


OBVERSE VARIATIONS: CODA: Part One

by ivorygates



Series: Obverse Variations [2]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Girl!Daniel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-03
Updated: 2011-04-03
Packaged: 2017-11-22 16:59:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the sequel to "Obverse Variations" and if I could figure out how to post it as a chaptered work I would die a happy woman.  All three parts of "Coda" are one story.  It's about 100K.  The usual babbling notes will be at the end of Part Three.</p><p>Oh, you want a summary <em>too?</em>  Okay: </p><p>
  <em>It's not, really, that they drift apart.  More as if they're trying to protect their love for each other by staying away from each other as they have in the past, though then it was in a different way and for different reasons. Jack works long hours, constantly.  She wishes sometimes, unworthily, that they'd died together, on one of their missions.  Going out together in a bright brief flare of glory.  Better that than this constant erosion of what they were and what they meant to be. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>Sometimes you have to take the long way around to Happily Ever After.</p>
            </blockquote>





	OBVERSE VARIATIONS: CODA: Part One

__

_**

I. The Best Years Of Our Lives

**_

__

In 1994 Project Giza was moved to Cheyenne Mountain because the dialing computers had been completed and Catherine Langford and her team thought they could get the Stargate to work.

In 1996 Dr. Danielle Jackson saw the Stargate for the first time, because Dr. Langford's team still hadn't deciphered the Coverstone and figured out how to make the Stargate work. Two weeks later she took a team through the Stargate for the first time -- or rather, Colonel Jack O'Neill did.

In 1997 Dr. Danielle Jackson came back through the Stargate and spent the next eight years following Jack O'Neill around the galaxy. At the end of 2004 he was posted to Washington. Six weeks later she took a leave of absence and followed him there. She married him in 2005.

#

  
  
She writes her books. Jack runs Homeworld Security. They both hate Washington and its social obligations. It takes its toll: on both their tempers, but most of all, on his health. No SGC now with its constant monitoring and forced compliance.

It's not, really, that they drift apart. More as if they're trying to protect their love for each other by staying away from each other as they have in the past, though then it was in a different way and for different reasons. Jack works long hours, constantly. After a while she begins to make quick trips -- a week or two -- back to the SGC. The reunions afterward are always good, but the tension of being where they both feel they aren't supposed to be -- in lives and roles that fill them with sensations ranging from weariness to outright hatred -- always builds up again like a cumulative poison. She thinks of a line from _Star Trek_ , the television show Jack made her watch so long ago. _'Having is not so satisfying as wanting.'_ She can't imagine her life without having taken the step of marrying Jack. It would have been cowardice. But she isn't happy. Her life and his, these days, is composed of elaborate strategies of avoiding pain -- receiving, inflicting. She wishes sometimes, unworthily, that they'd died together, on one of their missions. Going out together in a bright brief flare of glory. Better that than this constant erosion of what they were and what they meant to be. Because she loves him, she does, and she knows he loves her, but everything hurts so much, until she can't think straight and she can't remember a time when she was really happy. It was a long time ago. Years.

Sometimes she plays a dangerous game, thinking back to the last time she was happy. Not for a day or an hour, but the last time she was happy without being sick-certain it would end before it really started. Because that isn't happiness at all.

Her wedding day? No. Looking forward to looking back on it. The day itself hadn't made her happy.

Just before? God, no. Those three months were a nightmare, endurable only because of the happiness she thought then was coming.

Before that? She'd just come to Washington to be with him. There? Yes. A day or two, here and there, strung together, in between the tension, social missteps, and disasters. Enough to coax her into believing they could become the rule rather than the exception.

Before that?

Defrosting Jack. Getting him back. Having him be alive and whole -- she'd felt as if she'd come back from the dead herself. But then he'd been made a General. They wanted him to run the whole SGC. Something like that had never occurred to her. She'd always thought that Jack would simply stay on SG-1 until he retired. Was invalided out on a medical, more likely. He always complained about how he wasn't getting any younger, and their medical reviews were ferocious. But then he'd become the head of the whole SGC instead. And the two of them were still as locked into the corset of military rule and custom as they'd ever been, because he was even more her commanding officer than before. She saw less of him than ever and when she did he was harried and snappish, impatient with the strictures of administration and command. Even the rare, verging-on-bizarre occasions when the four of them functioned as SG-1 again weren't the same, because it wasn't Jack who was out with them, it was General O'Neill, and god help them if they lost the General. That whole year had possessed an odd sort of nightmare quality for her -- there'd been far worse times in her life, but she still kept hoping she'd wake up and find out her new reality wasn't real. That General Hammond was back, Jack was still a Colonel, and SG-1 was the way it'd always been.

She'd been happy then. No matter what Daniel had ever thought. He might have been merely content, in his world. She'd soared between heaven and hell on a daily basis, but she'd never been bored. When had she and Jack lost that? They should have gotten so much more, with marriage and a life together, but instead they'd lost what they had.

Because of Washington and the Homeworld Security post. Policy and politics and _politesse_. As the years accrue, he jokes about it when he can: 'the things I do for my country.' When he can't, he swears. When he can't do either, he goes lethally silent and retreats into his study. She's learned not to knock on the door. A docile, compliant, Washington wife. The thing she swore the world would never make of her.

He doesn't call her 'Indiana' any more.

But Jack will retire soon. She holds to that thought as she'd hold to the hope of rescue under torture. Maybe then they can get back what they had. Maybe then they can get _each other_ back.

Only Jack doesn't retire. He makes it as far as the retirement dinner. Stands up to give his farewell speech. Falls to the floor. Dead, the doctors tell her afterward, before he hit the ground. A massive stroke. (He always hated doctors -- other than Janet -- and bureaucrats in equal measure.)

He does not rise up in a shining ball of light. Dead is dead, and after all they've been through together and apart, it's a sort of comfort to know he's reached that haven beyond the cruelties of alien resurrection. But it tears her apart inside: she has loved him for more than half her adult life and never truly possessed him. The happiness together that she hoped for, intended, was taken away from them by circumstance in a process she still doesn't fully understand. She'd hoped for a 'later' in which to get it back, and there will be no 'later.'

Jack is dead.

Sammy's at the dinner and is there for all of it; a shoulder to cry on, except Dani doesn't cry. Sammy's a General now. Going to be the new head of the SGC, since Hank Landry will -- would have anyway -- be moving over to Homeworld Security to take Jack's place. After the funeral -- Teal'c comes -- Sammy suggests that Dani might consider coming back to the SGC full-time.

She hasn't thought that far ahead. She's only interested in getting out of Washington as soon as she can get rid of the house and all its contents, get away from the city that killed Jack, that did what the _Goa'uld_ and all the monsters they met through the Stargate never could. But she promises to think about it.

She goes to the cabin in Minnesota. Some of their best -- and worst -- times were spent here.

Nineteen years.

Met him. Went to Abydos. Spent a year there. Came back. Eight years on SG-1. He went to Washington. She followed. They married. Ten years. He died. And that … is the sum of her life. In the end he left her, just as Daniel did. The thought tears open a far-from-healed scar. Because she's never, at any moment in the last fourteen years, ever really … let _go_ … of Daniel. She's sure Jack knew. Maybe that was some of the trouble between them. She hopes it wasn't, but there's no way to know now, is there? Because Jack is dead. And Daniel -- really -- isn't.

Is he?

She makes up her mind. She's forty-five now. Far from old, though she feels ancient. But in almost twenty years she's lived a lifetime. The usual things: joy, pain, adventure, stark terror. She hasn't got the energy for anything more. There hardly seems any point. There's no point to a world in which Jack is dead.

But still, she wants … something. She wants to go home. There's only one place left for her to think of as that. She calls Sammy. And arranges to go back to the SGC.

#

It's six months since Jack died. She spent them at the cabin in Minnesota, but she puts it on the market when she leaves. She doesn't think she can bear to ever go back there again. She went back to Washington once -- long enough to sort through the things in storage, ruthlessly conducting a last triage. She'd done it once in the week after the funeral -- papers to official (though secret) archives, artifacts to museums: most of what's in storage now is books and clothing, a few items of furniture that have sentimental value, a few of Jack's things. She does a last culling, ships what she'll keep to Colorado Springs to wait for her there, takes the latest in a series of SUVs -- Jack's; she's sold her car already -- out of its garaging, and drives. She hates to fly, and this time she won't.

The trip takes her a week. She keeps in touch with Sammy by phone. Sammy worries about her. They've stayed in close touch over the years, though not over the last few months. She tried never to let Sammy know how it was -- how it had become -- between her and Jack, but she knows Sammy guessed a little of it.

All over and done now.

There's something Sammy isn't telling her. Needs to tell her. Sammy says she needs to see her before she reports to the SGC, that it's important, but it's something she has to tell her in person. Dani accepts this -- for one thing, she's on a cellphone; her end of the conversation could be too easily tapped. She thinks nothing further of it.

She's made arrangements, by email, with a realtor. There's a condominium waiting for her, close to the Base, ready to move in. She signs the papers the day she arrives. The house she wants isn't on the market at the moment; she's told LaToya the moment it is she'll buy it. At any price. Jack's old place. The cabin near the Mountain. Foolish, but she spent some of her happiest moments on Earth there. Wanting, and not having.

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. She can love him, and mourn him, and consign him safely to her harem of the vanished dead, because she can't hurt him any more.

_Time cannot wither, nor custom stale…_

_Golden lads and girls all must…_

Oh, god, why hadn't they both died when they were supposed to?

But he'd done his job, until Sammy could take it over. Kept them all safe. Fought for them until it killed him. And now, after a too-brief side-trip, she's back where she always suspected she'd end her life all along. She'll haunt the corridors of the SGC until the day she dies, a wizened graying professor, making cryptic pronouncements and gnomic utterances to Gate Teams that will undoubtedly seem younger every year. Occasionally uttering the fatal words: _'when I was on SG-1…'_ She ought to just shoot herself now.

Jack wouldn't like that.

She calls Sammy from her hotel room after she's finished with LaToya and the storage company -- she can't move in just yet; they can't give her a delivery date for her furniture earlier than Friday, and once it's here, she'll need to buy a few more pieces to fill out -- but gets nothing but a machine. She tries Sammy's cell, and gets VM telling her Sammy's in Washington, giving General Landry an emergency briefing. She'll be back by the end of the week. Their talk, Dani guesses, will have to wait.

It's Wednesday. She isn't supposed to report to the SGC until Monday. But it's harder being back in the Springs than she thought it would be. She might as well go up to the Mountain now and start getting settled in.

#

It's been ten years and some odd days since she was here full-time; a bit over a year since she was last here at all. When Jack told her he'd made up his mind -- set the date; was going to retire -- suddenly she had no more need to visit the SGC. She'd been sure she'd be there soon enough; to welcome Sammy aboard, and tease her. And maybe -- she hadn't been certain, but she'd hoped -- Jack would want to visit, too.

Now she's back in a way she'd never imagined. So many new faces -- true, the change happened little by little, down through the years, until one day she'd realized (a couple of years ago) that aside from a handful of people on 18 and 19, none of the people at the SGC are the ones who were there when she left, let alone the ones who were there when she arrived (for the second time) in March of 1996. Deaths, transfers, resignations have repopulated the SGC with strangers. It's a normal reality of life -- attrition's high among the Gate Teams, and transfers are common among military personnel. But it's an odd feeling.

Little else has changed since the days when she checked in here every day -- except, of course, for those days when she didn't check in because she hadn't left at all. Same corridors, same color scheme, same two-part mile-long ride down in an occasionally-balky elevator, following the palm-scan and the retinal scan at the third checkpoint. NORAD (their oblivious upstairs neighbor) is gone now, of course; the only thing that was actually supposed to be here at Cheyenne Mountain was disassembled and moved back in 2006, two years after she left for Washington. Fortunately the Air Force maintains the Base in a 'stand-by' state, available for reactivation at a moment's notice, so the Stargate Program can continue unimpeded. And the military being the military, nobody wonders why there's still so much traffic going into an 'empty' military base. Or why it's so heavily guarded a decade after it was closed.

Five checkpoints and two elevator rides later, she's back in the place that has as much right to be called home as any place in the universe does now. She stops at Documents and Records to get her ID updated, then goes down to her new office to start getting settled in. Most of her books and artifacts were shipped directly from Washington and are already waiting for her there. It's faintly entertaining how familiar the space already seems. Almost as if she never left at all.

But there's a surprise waiting for her at the SGC. A terrible one.

#

"Indy, uh, Dani, or, ah, maybe I ought to be calling you 'Dr. Jackson' now? But that just seems kinda wacky, you know, and--"

She spins away from the shelf, dropping the book she's holding. Jack is standing in the doorway. He's wearing a white lab-coat. His hair is dark again. Longer. But it's Jack.

She can't breathe.

He sees her face, and gets across her office just in time to catch her as her knees give way. He gets his hands under her elbows and walks her a few steps to her chair, lowering her into it.

"Dani!" he says sharply, squatting down to bring himself down to eye-level with her.

She takes a deep shuddering breath, pulling back from the edge of darkness. "Jack--" she says. She's dizzy. Can't focus. Can't think.

"It's John," he corrects her quietly. "John Nielsen. Doctor. Civilian. I'm … the clone, Dani. You remember."

Twelve years ago the rogue Asgard Loki cloned Jack. But the clone was flawed: Jack inside, but to all appearances, a fifteen-year-old boy, and dying. Thor stabilized the dying clone, the SGC gave it a new identity. Its ever-after was classified; she never knew what happened to it -- to him. Jack knew, of course -- even more so after he became head of Homeworld Security. He never said. Over the years, she'd forgotten the clone existed.

"They were supposed to have told you," he says. She can hear the anger in his voice. So much like Jack -- well, he _is_ Jack. All of Jack in every way, up to twelve years ago. "I thought they had. Carter was supposed to have told you."

He's … what? Twenty-seven? At least in body; his memories are of the adult Jack O'Neill. It is impossible not to see he's handsome; his hair is longer than Jack ever wore his; she keeps herself from touching it with an effort.

Twenty-seven.

She never knew Jack at that age; he was already in his early forties when she met him. Thirteen years older than she was. So … John … is just about the same age she was when she met Jack for the first time.

And she's nearly twenty years older, not thirteen.

"We didn't get a chance to talk before I came. When did…?" _When did you come to take Jack's place?_

"About three months ago. They recruited me. Keeping an eye on me, I guess. I figured … what the hell. Got a lab down on 19. They say they'll put me on a Gate Team if I'm good, but you know how the SGC feels about civilians on the Teams." He grins at her. Jack's smile.

"Lab? Civilian?" He isn't making any sense.

"Dr. John Nielsen, PhDs in Engineering. Mechanical and Chemical. I take things apart. I put them together. Sometimes I blow things up," he says patiently. The smile fades.

"You?"

"Hey, I'm not as dumb as I look."

"You never were." Jack never was.

"Look, I… I heard about … Jack. I'm sorry."

She can't bear this. She puts her hands over her face, shutting out the sight of him. "Oh, god, just… get out. Get out."

She hears him get to his feet and leave.

#

His name is John Nielsen. He's twenty-seven years old. He's twelve years old. He's sixty-six years old. It depends on who you ask. He has three birthdates. One is patently false -- the one he uses. One he can't claim -- because he shares it with a man, now dead, who has -- had -- more right to it than he does. One is the truth, but since it's only twelve years ago, it's not really very useful.

In his life -- his real life, the one he shares with the man now dead -- he had to make a lot of tough decisions. This time, the tough decision was to turn his back on his friends, on his life, to ... impersonate ... a fifteen-year-old boy. It was lonely, but it was the only real choice. Because somebody else was already living his life.

And doing that gave him a lot of time to think.

He'd thought about doing things he'd never done. Or had almost done.

You didn't make Colonel in the U.S. Air Force without an advanced degree. He -- or, rather, Jack O'Neill -- already had a Master's in Combat Engineering. He sat through two years of High School, basically finding his feet, and then set out to _really_ study How Things Worked. He turned out to have something of a talent for it.

So he'd spent the next eight years in college. Then two years doing R&D in the private sector. (He'd actually filed a patent or two. Looked like listening to Carter all those years had paid off.) Then about six months ago the boys in blue came knocking. They wanted to recruit him for the Program. Hadn't known who he really was, of course.

There's a number he's supposed to call if something like that comes up, and he did. He'd thought that would be the end of it. But another set of Blue Boys showed up -- ones who knew who John Nielsen really was (or used to be). And it turned out they _did_ want him after all. In spite of that. Or because of it.

So he's back at the Mountain after twelve years.

He'd gotten a little of the gossip before he'd come in. SG-1 was decommissioned more than a decade ago. The _Goa'uld_ had been pretty much defeated. Teal'c had gone home. The Other Guy and Dani had gone to Washington, and married. Only Carter was still here. Or, apparently, back here. In fact, by the time he'd come -- back -- to the SGC, Jack O'Neill was dead. He wasn't sure how he felt about that. Both O'Neill being dead, and the fact he'd married Dani.

 _His_ Dani.

She'd asked him to wait for her.

It's not true. He knows it isn't. He's the clone. O'Neill is -- was -- the original. But he doesn't feel like a copy. And he'd waited anyway. Not really because he'd ever expected to see her again. The terms of the deal he'd made was that he wouldn't see any of them again. Ever. No one he'd known. No one he'd... loved. But it was kind of hard to try to work up an interest in women your own age when the inside and the outside -- yours -- didn't match. Meanwhile, it's good to be back at the SGC. They always had the best toys.

Nice to see that Carter finally made General, too. Last he saw, she was a Major. When he arrived for his initial interview, he asked her about Dani. Twenty-seven apparent years has a little more authority than fifteen; she told him Dani was at the cabin in Minnesota, that she's doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances. He can't get in touch with her now any more than he ever could. So he put the thought of it out of his mind and concentrated on settling in. Works on getting assigned to a Gate Team again. And one day he hears Dani's coming back to the SGC.

Carter calls him into her office. Supposedly to tell him what he's already heard through the grapevine. Not exactly to tell him to behave himself and not make trouble. She does say she'll be sure to warn Dani about the presence and existence of 'John Nielsen' before she arrives. So he'd thought, when he went down to her office, that she knew he was there, and who he was. She looks very fancy these days. New hair, new glasses. Too thin. A little tired.

He'd rather not see a look like that on her face ever again. She'd thought he was Jack O'Neill, back from the dead. He'd always been happy to see her when _she_ came back from the dead. But this isn't the old days. And in their shared experience, coming back can have a lot of problems attached. Everything from a _Tok'ra_ riding shotgun to turning out to be a robot. An alien crystal. A quantum double.

He's missed her. But she hasn't missed him. Her husband died just six months ago. She's buried Jack O'Neill. He's sure they were happy together. She deserved that. _They_ deserved that. _He_ deserved that, and he didn't get it.

Maybe the next time he sees her, things will go better.

#

It's a long time after he leaves before she's willing to move.

Jack.

Not Jack.

Jack from the last time they were all truly happy together, plus twelve unknown years of becoming someone else. Sammy tried to warn her. Wanted to warn her. Obviously he -- _John_ \-- thought she knew.

What is she going to do? She's not sure she can imagine staying at the SGC now, but she can't think of anywhere else to go. Finally she gets to her feet and continues unpacking her books. If he's smart, he'll stay out of her way.

Later that day she meets with the current head of Archaeo-Anthropology and Translation. It's a full-time desk job now. No gallivanting around offworld and playing endless catchup for Dr. Amelia Mertz. Dani picked her out herself to take over the department when she left; she'd been one of Dani's best assistants for years. Cautious and thorough. Amelia seems glad to see her when Dani drops by her office.

"I suppose you'll be wanting your old job back?"

"Of course not, Amelia, I--"

"Oh, for God's sake, Dani, cut the crap." Amelia leans back in her chair, hunts among the piles of papers on her desk for the inevitable and ever-present cup of tea, locates it, and sighs. "The idea of _you_ being _my_ assistant is ridiculous."

"I haven't been staff for ten years. Haven't been here at all in over a year."

"So?" Amelia is unimpressed.

"So, I... I want a Gate Team posting." The words are out of her mouth before she realizes it. She hadn't known she was going to say them. Hadn't thought about it. But it is, she realizes, what she wants. Going through the Gate. The cure for all ills. You can't brood about the fact your life is ashes when you're being shot at.

Amelia raises an eyebrow. "Aren't you a little old for it?"

"Forty-six." Another birthday a few weeks ago. "There are teams with older members." Jack was older.

Amelia studies her. "You'd have to requalify. Pass the physical, you know. And it would be up to the General."

"I can pass the physical." It will take work to get back in qualifying shape. But she can do it. And get around Sammy.

"Still, I don't see why you can't do both. You used to."

Dani smiles just a little. "I was younger then."

Amelia smiles back. "Well, don't use that argument on General Carter or you'll spend the next ten years up in C&T. There are still _Goa'uld_ artifacts there we haven't cataloged. Now come on. I'll give you three weeks to get current with the department as it is now. Then, by god, I'm passing the buck, like it or not."

"In that case, you're also going to be helping me move in, just as soon as my furniture gets here."

"Name the day, Dr. Jackson."

#

There's a new CMO in the infirmary when she finally gets there for the mandatory 'welcome aboard' physical. A grandmotherly-looking woman -- a Major -- named Erin Hunnicutt. She objects to everything about Dani, from her weight -- too low -- to her blood-pressure -- too high. Tells her to eat properly -- regular meals at regular times -- and to cut down on the coffee. Or cut it out entirely. Suggests a regular exercise program wouldn't come amiss. Well, she'd been planning -- expecting -- to do that anyway. (Not giving up the coffee, though.)

Dani spends the rest of the day alternating between getting her office in order and greeting old friends. Word of her arrival has spread. Everyone she knows -- it seems -- is stopping by to see her. Too many of them to offer condolences. She doesn't want to think about Jack here. Not when it seems so possible that he -- not John, not the _clone_ \-- might walk through her door at any moment. Telling her that they're late -- for the Stargate, for a briefing -- that she's always late, come _on_ , Indiana...

John called her 'Indy.'

Jack stopped calling her that a long time ago.

Why the hell isn't the damned clone at Area 51?

#

He suspects Dani would be really pissed to find out he's bought the cabin in Minnesota. But it's _his_ , dammit. And she's the one who put it up for sale.

He knew O'Neill was going to want to retire there -- _he_ did, after all. But hell, the old man couldn't live forever. And he knew -- at least he thought -- that Dani wouldn't want to live there alone ... after. So he'd had a local realtor keeping an eye out in case it ever came on the market. For _when_ it came on the market, actually. His body's twenty-seven, not his mind; he takes the long view. He knew he'd still want the place in twenty years. Or thirty.

And about two weeks ago it had. And he bought it; civilian consultants and real-world engineers holding keystone patents made a lot more money than Air Force Colonels -- or Generals -- ever did. He handled everything through his lawyer; unless Dani really digs she'll never know who the buyer was. And unless she's changed a lot, she won't dig. It's not that she's exactly scatterbrained about money, but she'd always been superficial at best.

He isn't supposed to buy the place, of course. 'Avoid your old haunts.' That's one of the rules. But the old man is dead. Screw the rules. Sure, he looks a lot like Jack O'Neill, but it's Minnesota. A lot of people do in those parts. He can pass himself off as a distant cousin if anyone remarks on the resemblance when he goes up there -- that was always his fallback cover story anyway -- but they probably won't. Twenty-seven doesn't look a lot like sixty-six. Fewer scars. Except on the inside, where they really count.

He wishes to hell people would stop _consoling_ her. That's all he's heard about all day today: the grieving widow. The Base grapevine works as well as ever, and half his fellow geeks -- crap, he and Felger are comrades-in-arms now, and Felger's going grey -- knew her in the old days. John's supposed to be retro-engineering a _Goa'uld_ cloaking-device to work with the current generation of _naquaadriah_ generator -- now that they're both portable and really reliable -- and he can't get anything done because he's being interrupted every five minutes by yet another person wandering in to his lab to tell him (in hushed reverent tones) that The Legendary Dr. Jackson has returned to the SGC, complete with a lurid -- and highly-inaccurate (if you want his opinion) -- rehash of her past career, and footnoted with Her Tragic Bereavement. Bookended (to top it all off) with how _brave_ she is to come back to the SGC at all.

He can't make up his mind whether to be amused or just annoyed. For crying out loud: brave? Is the Commissary lasagna going to attack her? The SGC's pretty safe these days, and work is the best thing for her, if they'll let her do any, and stop reminding her she's hurt. She always hated that. Taking care of Indiana was always a delicate business. Had to be done at arm's length. You couldn't let her know you were doing it. She'd dig in her heels, get up to something reckless just to prove she didn't need taking care of. Stubborn that way. And taking care of her isn't his ... privilege ... any more.

He shakes his head. It never was -- not his. He's the copy. He's got to remember that. John Nielsen. Not Jack O'Neill. He's had twelve years of being John Nielsen. But it's hard to remember, especially here. He's always thought of himself as Jack O'Neill. 'John Nielsen' is a cover identity, something he's had before, in his other life. It's not that he isn't perfectly aware there is -- or was, until recently -- a _real_ Jack O'Neill out there with a better right to the life they both remember equally well... It's just that deep inside he was never quite convinced.

He's got a lot more sympathy for the Robot Him now; the tin man Harlan made. It'd thought it was him -- well, _O'Neill_. It wanted its real life back as much as he has. It's one of life's blacker jokes that he and a machine have so much in common, but it's true: the moment of realizing somebody else had a better right to _his life_ than he did. He knows Robot O'Neill was killed on Juna, but Harlan took all the bits and pieces home with him, so the little guy probably managed to put them all back together again. He's pretty sure his counterpart doesn't think of that as a blessing, wherever it is. (John doubts, somehow, Jack O'Neill ever came to share his view of things. It's all a matter of perspective.)

At least Robot O'Neill had been in a position to create a version of the life it'd lost. And at least Harlan created a whole Robot SG-1: Robot O'Neill wasn't alone. He'd had Indiana -- or a copy of her -- with him. While John Nielsen had been asked -- told -- just to walk away and never look back. He'd done what he was asked -- it was better than dying -- but he'd known he was going into a solitary exile. Like prison, in a way, except he was his own jailer. His mind was his own, though. As the years passed, he's thought about them, wondering. Especially her.

She's -- he runs the math in his head, is surprised at the number he comes up with -- 46 now. Ought to be able to take care of herself. Yeah, until she gets a wild idea in her head and forgets everything she ever knew about self-preservation and common sense. Can't get into much trouble up on 18, though, can she?

At the end of the day, he goes home. Home is a condominium complex near the Base these days. He's looking for a house in the Springs, but he's picky. Something with a garden and not too long a commute. He's thought of trying to buy back the old cabin near the Base, but it wasn't on the market last he checked. Besides, it would be ... creepy. As if he were trying to become Jack O'Neill. One trot down Memory Lane is enough. He's spent too many years becoming someone else. Someone ... not quite the same.

Someone Jack O'Neill could have been.

#

 

At the end of the day she goes back to her hotel room. There's a message on the phone. Sammy's called. She calls back, and this time she reaches her.

"You went to The Mountain."

Gossip travels fast. "And I met your new boy." The spiteful anger in her voice surprises her. This isn't Sammy's fault.

"Dani, I'm sorry. That's why I wanted to see you before you--"

"Saw him," she finishes. "It's all right, Sammy. I'm fine."

"I know it has to have been a shock," Sammy says quietly.

"I've had worse," she says. Though right now she can't think of any. Equally bad, yes. But worse? No. Not worse than turning around, looking up, seeing _Jack_ standing in the doorway, smiling at her with that casual assumption of ... right.

Not Jack.

"I should be back by Friday. Saturday at the latest," Sammy says.

"Amelia wants me to take over the Department again," Dani answers.

"I want to talk to you about that."

"There are some things I want to talk to you about, too, Sammy," she says.

#

Thursday's a repeat of Wednesday. By the end of the day her office is beginning to take shape. She sits in on her first Department Meeting, is assigned her first projects. She tells Amelia she'll be sitting Friday out. Her furniture will be arriving -- and in the way of moving and storage companies everywhere, they're only willing to give her a range of hours, not a fixed time. If it arrives at a decent hour, she'll come in afterward. Once she could simply have had an airman wait for it in her place, but things are different now. And besides, she isn't really here yet.

Amelia smiles. "We'll see you Saturday, then. With bells on."

_'We?'_

The movers arrive at her condo door at a quarter to five on Friday. She's wasted a whole day waiting. Not really a new experience, the waiting.

#

__

_**

II. Imitation of Life

**_

__

When Saturday comes, Dani understands Amelia's cryptic pledge. Amelia's brought most of 18 with her to help with the unpacking and shelving, as well as -- it seems -- half the rest of the SGC. Matthews has brought his tools, so her piano is in tune by noon. She barely has to do anything at all.

She remembers her first apartment in the Springs, the loft on Maitland Street. All the crates of her family's furniture, released at last from years of storage. Jack, Sammy, two airmen. They helped her move in, unpack. She was 26, just back from the dead. She's only kept one or two of those pieces, and the piano. Too many memories. Bad ones accrued over the years.

In the middle of the chaos of unpacking -- everyone else seems to have a firm idea of where her things should go; she'll locate them later -- Sammy walks in. She must have stopped at home first; she's in civilian clothes. Dani meets her at the door and hugs her.

"Quite a party," Sammy says. "Dani, about living here--"

"Close to the Base, easy to get without having to look at a lot of places, convenient. It's not like I'm going to be spending a lot of time here. Amelia's helping me move in," she says. Inadequate to describe or even explain the chaos. Sammy grins at her, but Dani thinks she looks worried.

"You should have checked with me first."

"About buying a condo? C'mon, Sammy."

"You could have stayed with me for a few months. This might not be the best place--"

Dani holds up her hand. She doesn't want to continue the conversation. And she knows she could have stayed with Sammy. Thought about it. But she wanted her own place immediately. The solitude. The ability to retreat.

Sammy gives up. "Looks like you could still use a few things." There's almost no furniture in the living room other than the piano.

"Thought I'd shop once I saw what I had." She'll need a couch. Chairs.

"Looks like all there's left for me to do is phone for pizza, then."

"Oh no you don't. Come see the kitchen." She leads Sammy to the kitchen. Nearly everyone who came has brought food or drink. The refrigerator and every flat surface is crammed to overflowing.

"Holy Hannah," Sammy says weakly. "But Dani, I think you should know--"

"Dr. Hunnicutt said I needed to put on a few pounds, but I don't think this is what she had in mind," Dani says. Why won't Sammy let the subject drop? "Coffee?" she asks.

"She's still letting you have coffee?"

"She didn't exactly say I couldn't have coffee," Dani answers (truthfully yet inaccurately), pouring herself a cup. "So how was Washington?"

"I don't know how you and General O'Neill stood it all those years," Sammy answers.

"We didn't," Dani says quietly.

#

Saturdays are for errands and chores. He gets back from a grocery run a couple of hours after noon and finds cars parked all up and down the street. All the Guest Parking is filled, too. Somebody must be having a party. Hard to find a place to park his Jeep.

When he takes out the trash about an hour later, the area around the Dumpster is piled high with boxes, all of them marked with the name of a moving company. Some wooden crates, too, big ones, broken down. Obviously somebody new moving in. As he stands there, contemplating this fact -- and the idiocy of humanity, because the Waste Removal people will just ignore the wooden crates -- who should appear but Felger, bearing two large black plastic garbage bags.

_Felger?_

"Hey, Johnny," he chirps. "You just get here? Come on."

Short of murder, there's been no way to convince Felger not to call him 'Johnny'. Felger. Crap. Brilliant -- he knows enough to know that now -- but ... an idiot. And like an idiot himself -- a curious idiot with no sense of self-preservation, which is what anyone who takes any of Felger's suggestions has to be -- John follows him. Brain in neutral, though he knows by now (a) someone new is moving in and (b) it's an SGC someone, or else why would Felger be here? (Felger and everyone else he sees when he gets to the door of the place.) First floor. Back. Opposite side of the complex from his place. And dammit, he recognizes the furniture. The piano. He knows who's moved in. But by then he's halfway in the door, and everyone's saying _hi, how are you, good to see you John._ He can't just turn and bolt. And Indy walks out of the kitchen with Carter.

They always had the worst damned luck in all the world, him (the other him) and her. In the little things, the things that wouldn't actually kill you. Wrong time, wrong place -- for him, the place had never been right, though he guesses for her things worked out in the end. For a while.

"Now you know," Carter says to her. "Dani, I think you know Dr. John Nielsen. Dr. Nielsen, I'm sure you've already met Dr. Jackson. The two of you are neighbors now. Dr. Jackson's just moved into the complex."

"Oh," Indy says. She looks at him, and her face is blank, but his girl always had the worst poker face in the entire universe: she's furious that he's here, but she can't quite bring herself to put the blame on him. She always blamed herself, even when something wasn't her fault. She glances at Carter, then back at him. "Please come in. I think you know everyone here. There's food in the kitchen, if you're hungry."

He'd like to leave -- for her sake. But it wouldn't look right. He forces himself to smile. She smiles back. It doesn't reach her eyes.

Inspired by and yet strangely oblivious to the company, Felger starts in -- for approximately the one-millionth time, and that's just since John's gotten to the SGC -- on the story of how he and his idiot lab-rat partner Coombs rescued SG-1, fighting shoulder to shoulder with Dr. Jackson herself. Does the man not understand that he's _telling this story to two of the members of SG-1_?

That he knows of.

And John looks up again and meets Indy's gaze. He simply can't help it. She has a glazed agonized look in her eyes. She's trying not to laugh. He can hear the words she's fighting not to say as plainly as if she'd already said them. _Yes, Jay, I know. I was there._ In another moment she _will_ say them. She'll hate herself afterward, of course, because she'll have been rude to a guest, even if it's only Felger. He takes the man's arm.

"C'mon, Silent Bob. Let's go see what's in the kitchen."

"But I was just--"

"Later." He takes Felger's arm and steers him away. The exciting story of Felger's single-handed destruction of the Jaffa army will have to wait for a future time.

"Know who you were talking to out there?" he asks casually, once they've reached the kitchen. Indy may not want to slam-dunk Felger, but John feels no need to resist. He watches, smirking, as Felger works it out. The man actually looks stricken, but it doesn't bother John at all. Original or copy, he's just not a nice person. "You don't need to tell them the story, Felger. They were there."

_And so was I._

#

"Well, this is going to be awkward," Dani mutters. She and Sammy are in the second bedroom, the one that will be her home office. O'Reilly's there, crawling around under her desk. Her phone lines are switched on, now he's making sure her computer lines work. Considering his day-job is to make sure the computers in the Gate Room work, she's sure her computer will be fine.

Nyan -- grown old in service at the SGC -- is meticulously transferring her papers from their storage boxes to her file cabinet. Since he was her personal assistant at the SGC for years, she's equally certain she'll find everything exactly where she expects it to be. She smiles at him.

 _"It's good to have you back, Dr. Jackson,"_ he said when he arrived.

 _"It's good to be back,"_ she'd answered. Because that's what you say, whether it's true or not. Old friends, old colleagues, old habits, old haunts. The only thing missing is Jack. And even Jack is here, in a freaky way.

"Oh, at least we didn't have to listen to the Herak story again," Sammy says. "And... you could move."

"I'm going to buy a house, but I'm not going to hurry," she says. She's quite a wealthy widow, but there's only one house she wants. She'll wait for it.

 _Wait for me, Jack?_ she'd said.

But he hadn't. He'd left her.

Damn him.

#

"Do you think you can work with him?"

It's after five. The captains and the kings -- literal captains, in some cases, no actual kings -- have departed, and Sammy's the only one left. They're sitting on the living room floor -- no furniture -- drinking Scotch out of Irish crystal. Her tableware -- linens, crystal, china, silver -- may just be worth more than her current residence. And at that, she got rid of most of it. At one time -- oh, god -- she could set a table for a formal sit-down dinner for 24 without renting plates. Spode china. Gorham silver. Waterford crystal. A life she's fled from and never wants to return to. Those grand and glittering arrays -- wedding gifts -- are gone now. She's kept bits and pieces of the 'second best' sets and one-off gifts.

The decanting of her life into its new box turned into a de-facto party at the end. The newly-tuned piano was played, as were all possible facets of her sound-system. The lack of furniture in the living room turned out to be a very good thing, as it left room for dancing. By the time she and Sammy toured the far corners of her domain -- bedrooms, bathrooms, closet, linen closet -- John Nielsen was gone, and Felger stayed amazingly quiet for the rest of the afternoon. Most of the food got eaten, thank god, and the carnage has been cleared away by the departed guests. She'll have to go grocery shopping in a day or two, perhaps even tomorrow, though she can probably survive on housewarming presents for a while; nearly everyone brought coffee.

"Dear me, Sammy, what if I can't?" she demands scornfully. "You going to shoot him? Give him back to the Asgard?"

"I could have him transferred to Area 51," Sammy answers. She's the General now. She can do things like that.

"That doesn't seem fair. He wants a Gate Team." Dani takes a deep breath. "So do I."

"Dani, I--" Sammy begins.

"Don't tell me I'm not qualified."

"There are physical requirements."

"I'll meet them. Oh, probably not this week. But soon. Next?"

"AA&T?"

"I didn't come back to take Amelia's job. She's done fine for ten years. Earth's still here, and nobody's speaking _Goa'uld_ , or Alteraan, or Wraith, or whatever the invasive flavor _du jour_ is."

"She's retiring."

"She's only a year or two older than I am. And she didn't say a word to me."

Sammy shrugs. "End of the year. Whether you take her place or not. She doesn't want anybody to know, but, you know, I'm the General. That means I know things. Usually," she adds darkly.

It's August. Jack's been dead six months. Sammy has been head of the SGC six months. Jack never lived to see Sammy do what he'd trained her to do. Every time Dani thinks the pain is going to stop, it hurts in some new way.

"Why?" _Why is Amelia retiring?_ Dani means.

"And I don't tell all I know," Sammy says. "It's a military thing." Sammy's fifty-one this year. She's been military two-thirds of her life. Involved with the Stargate -- one way or another -- for most of her military career.

"Gate team?" Dani asks. "Yes or no, Sammy?"

"AA&T?" Sammy asks in return.

Dani regards her, eyes narrowed. She's always known the military puts The Job before people, even when it hurts. Jack taught her that lesson as gently as he could. He taught her tactics, too. Strategy.

"Going to let a Department Head be on a Gate Team, Sammy? General Hammond did. General O'Neill did. I never had to deal with General Landry that way. What's General Carter going to do? You know it will probably take me at least three months to get in shape to pass the physical requirements. Might even be six. Amelia wants her answer three weeks from now. Going to lock me in as head of AA&T and then say 'sorry, can't risk Department Heads, you're too valuable where you are'?"

"Dani, when you talked about coming back, joining a Team was never mentioned."

"Sammy, when you asked me to come back, heading up the Department was never mentioned," she answers, echoing Sammy's pitch and rhythm exactly. They're close to arguing. She tries another tack. "Sammy, there are a lot of good administrators, and any of them will be better at it than I am. Decent archaeologists. Pretty good linguists. Adequate translators, especially when dealing with a known language and a lot of reference, and I've already written most of the reference. But ... out in the field? First contact? Anthro-linguists with cultural experience? The best use you can make of me is sending me Out There. If you don't want to do that ... fine. But I didn't come back here to be an administrator. I came to work in my field."

"Can you do both?" Sammy asks. Bargaining.

"Run the department and be a full-time member of a Gate Team?" Dani hesitates. At 35 there weren't enough hours in the day for both. She's pretty sure the days get shorter every year. "Promise me a Team assignment if and when I pass the physical qualification. I'll run the Department while I get in shape and up to speed. If I can't do both, by then I'll know who in the Department is qualified to hand it over to, and I'll still be here to backstop them."

Sammy sighs. "Get Dr. Hunnicutt's recommendation and I'll assign you." There's a pause. "Dani. What's out there this time?"

She shrugs. "I don't know." It's more a case of what isn't here. Neither of the men she loves. "What about Nielsen?" she asks.

Sammy looks startled. It's always been fun to startle the General of the SGC. She'll have served under three of the four, now. Just as glad to have skipped Landry, except for the consulting. He'd always tried to jolly and intimidate her; a bad combination. Still, the SGC got along well enough under him.

"A Gate Team. He wants one. You going to give it to him?" Dani prods.

Sammy looks cautious, troubled, and sly -- all at once. "I haven't decided. What's your opinion?"

"Mine?" Dani's turn to be startled now.

"Yours. Cultural specialist. Advise me. If I put him into a Team -- remember, he's a civilian -- under military command -- what's he going to do?"

"His job?" Dani suggests. She stares down into her Scotch, thinking. He said he was a ... what? Mechanical engineer? Doesn't seem as if it would involve much running around in alien temple complexes pissing off the locals, though probably poking at unreliable alien machines would be a factor.

"You know, Sammy," she says after a long moment, "it's not that he's going to try to take command. And you know he can take orders. As for following orders, I think ... that's going to depend on how he's treated."

#

Dani's always been loyal. Nobody knows that better than Sam. "Suicidally loyal" would be a fair assessment: if she'd made up her mind to follow you wherever you led, Death and Hell weren't only just signposts, they were set somewhere near the beginning of the journey. And so she'd always said, down through the years, that she and the General were doing fine. Great. But this past week, while Sam was in Washington, any number of people had been willing -- happy -- to tell Sam otherwise.

_'You're a friend of Dr. Jackson's, aren't you, General Carter? I just thought you should know...'_

Or a friend of General O'Neill's. The name didn't matter. The chance to spread gossip did. Because the General was safely dead and buried, and Dani was gone, and Sam was a fresh audience for old news. News the tellers, obviously, hoped she'd carry back to wherever Dr. Jackson was now.

_'Do give her my best if you see her, General Carter. We were very close friends.'_

Sam can fill in the blanks now, given what she's been told. It paints a picture of the lives of her two dearest friends -- yes, oh lord, General O'Neill had been a friend to her as much as a CO -- so much different than the one Dani wanted her to have.

The Washington posting -- Dani even told her once she thought of it that way -- was a kind of mission. A long and vital one, with no relief and no escape. Missions weren't supposed to go on for weeks and months and years. It ground them both down, took them away from themselves. The General turned snappish, then sullen, then grim (Sam knows the progression exactly from a thousand missions gone sour). Dani withdrew, becoming silent, and when that was impossible, bitterly sarcastic. She can be sweet-tempered and trusting, as emotionally-open as a child, but only when everything's right in her world. Upset her badly enough for long enough and you might as well open your veins yourself, because she'll certainly draw blood. The two of them had flayed each other alive. Oh, never in public. But there's no real privacy in Washington. The state of the O'Neill/Jackson marriage hadn't really been a secret. And they'd loved each other anyway -- despite it, because of it? -- even through the worst of it. When he'd commanded SG-1 General O'Neill loved them all, each in a different way. Then he'd died, and the two of them had never gotten a chance to set it right.

Sam remembers the funeral. Dani was distant and formal and gracious and eerily calm. Sam thought at the time it was shock, and only weeks afterward she'd realized: _no_. It was the end of the mission, and Dani was determined to get them all back through the Gate alive. It was what General O'Neill would have wanted.

And after that Dani came back to the only place left that even remotely resembles 'home' for her now, only to be confronted with John Nielsen. Well, it was more than a little shock for Sam to see the top-secret briefing book attached to the personnel folder of the SGC's latest scientist acquisition, and then to face him across her desk only three months after General O'Neill's death. He'd just found out the General was dead a few days before. Ordinary civilians didn't even know there _was_ a Department of Homeworld Security, let alone the name of the man running it. The General's death had been mentioned in passing while John Nielsen was in Washington for his initial intake interviews, and he'd been skilled enough to pump his interviewers for information they hadn't known they were giving up. So when John Nielsen walked into her office, he already knew his ... donor ... was dead.

It's hard to look at John Nielsen and not see General O'Neill. Even the military bearing's only slightly blurred by twelve years as a civilian. (Though Sam knows she has a pretty good imagination, it's not one good enough to allow her to imagine General Jack O'Neill being invited to join the SGC on the basis of his scientific abilities.) The first person he'd asked after was Dani. And that was when Sam realized Dani would be coming back to the SGC to come face-to-face with ... John Nielsen. She'd wanted to warn her, but 'John's' history was classified. Sam couldn't put it into a letter or an email or talk about it on an open phone line, and by the time John arrived at the SGC, Dani was off at the cabin in Minnesota. She'd settled for calling Dani up and extracting a promise -- a _firm_ promise -- that Dani wouldn't come to the SGC without seeing Sam first.

Then Sam had been called to Washington to help Hank Landry defend the SGC from sticky fingers on its budget. And Dani went to the SGC without talking to her, because Dani always considered the general run of promises negotiable when circumstances changed. And she ran right into Nielsen, who had no reason to think she didn't know who he was.

Sam would like Dani to talk with her about it -- _really_ talk about it, instead of saying she's fine. Once they would have. But -- partly -- Dani doesn't quite trust _General_ Carter. And partly, Sam thinks, it's tied up in the guilt she thinks Dani feels at not having been ... happy ... in Washington. Even though it takes a politician to be happy in Washington, and neither Dani nor the General were ever politicians. All that is bad enough. What's worse is that out of dumb bad luck Dani ended up moving into the same condominium complex Nielsen lives in, though it was almost to be expected if she was looking to find a quick place to live close to work. Worse yet is that Felger drags Nielsen into the middle of Dani's barnraising, though Dani carries it off with the grace of someone who has, after all, been a political hostess for the past decade. But the worst of all, Sam thinks, just might be the moment when their eyes -- Dani's and Nielsen's -- meet, and for a moment Sam's sure Dani forgets anyone else was in the room.

Because Sam already knows John Nielsen is in love with Dani -- has never stopped being in love with Dani, actually, because General O'Neill was apparently in love with Dani almost from the moment they met.

She watches now as Dani frowns faintly, thinking through an answer to her last question. Three months to make quals? Probably six at least. There are dark shadows under Dani's eyes, and her cheekbones stand out too sharply, and Sam knows once she starts work, she'll throw herself into it and let her health issues slide. Sam really shouldn't worry about deciding whether or not to let her back into the field. Dani will probably never qualify, and once she hits fifty, she's ineligible under the new regulations for a first assignment. It's true it wouldn't be a first assignment, but by then it will have been more than fifteen years since Dani was on SG-1, and Sam has some leeway in her interpretation of the regs. If Dani's already on a Team when she hits the Big 5-0 she could stay on it if she continued to pass her physicals -- but why worry about that since she'll never qualify at all?

"So you think he'll follow orders about as well as you ever did?" Sam says with a faint smile.

"Jack respected me when we were on the Teams," Dani answers with quiet dignity. "We argued, but he did. He always listened to me, and, believe it or not, I _did_ listen to him. Probably not enough, of course. I think ... John ... will do more listening -- if his team leader doesn't just look at his official age, and the fact he's a civilian, and decide he's nothing but a burden and a waste of time and dismiss everything he has to offer out of hand."

"Maybe _you_ should be his Team leader," Sam says. She hopes Dani will take it as the joke she means it to be. Dani as John's team leader would be far past _folie a deux_ and on into God knows what. Probably something involving stolen spaceships and starting an interplanetary war or two.

To her relief, Dani just laughs. There's no particular humor in it. And Sam still isn't sure what she's going to do about Nielsen.

#

He gets out of there as soon as he decently can. Leaves the whole complex. Spends the rest of the day at his gym, beating hell out of the heavy bag. He was Golden Gloves in College; one way to work off the tension of a monastic lifestyle. When he'd started his new life, he'd thought things would be so simple (aside from missing his _life_ and everyone he loved): he didn't mind the thought of dating women a few years younger than he was -- face it, no man did -- but he soon realized that no matter what he looked like, no matter who they thought he was, no matter who he tried to be, deep inside he was convinced his new apparent contemporaries were _children_. High School was a nightmare, and college wasn't much better -- the women he thought of as his peers -- women in their forties, and up -- saw a toyboy. A prize. The ones who _were_ willing to be interested in him -- a man half their age; less -- weren't the sort of women he liked. Or wanted. (He ended up with a lot of time to study.)

At the gym, he works out until he's exhausted, until it's a tossup as to whether he'll drive home or fall asleep in the parking lot. He makes it home on sheer willpower. When he gets back to the complex, the visitors' cars are gone. He drives past her unit. Just a simple recon. The living room lights are on. There's a black SUV with DC plates parked in front of her door. Not a big stretch to figure out it's her car. He drives on. Parks. Goes in to his unit. It's very quiet. And in the quiet, the thoughts he's kept pushed down all day come boiling up. _Why shouldn't you have her? Why shouldn't you have each other? She's a widow now. Widows remarry._

He thinks of the way she'd looked at him when Felger started up. Sharing the joke with someone who'd been there. When Felger'd popped out of the wall on that _ha'tak_ and announced he was there to rescue them, he'd wanted to kill him. Okay, it hadn't been him. But he remembers it. And in every way that matters, it _was_ him. Last man standing. To the victor goes...

Indy isn't a prize of any kind. Not in the sense of being an object to be awarded. He isn't thinking that. But she's a young woman still. She'll meet somebody. Fall in love. Maybe even marry again. He wants it to be him. He wants her.

"Yeah," he sighs aloud. "Having her be able to stand to be in the same room with you. That'd be a good start." He goes off to fix dinner.

#

On Monday she tells Amelia she'll take the Department. It's become much more meeting-heavy and paperwork-driven in her absence; Landry was a traditionalist, and he ran the SGC for nearly a decade, turning it into much more of a by-the-book military command than it ever was under General Hammond or Jack. The first thing she's going to do when she gets AA&T back is streamline it. It needs to be able to function the way it used to if she's going to be able to run it and serve on a Gate Team.

In the afternoon she meets with Dr. Hunnicutt. Her lab results are in, and the doctor wants to go over them.

She wants to talk to Dr. Hunnicutt too. "I intend to qualify for a Gate Team, Doctor. Tell me how."

"You can't," Hunnicutt says flatly.

"Doctor, I've come back from the dead five times. Don't tell me I can't. Tell me how."

Hunnicutt talks about cholesterol and blood pressure and resting heart rate. She mentions the fatal phrase 'a woman your age', which Dani ignores. At last, after half an hour of badgering, Hunnicutt produces a diet list, a meal schedule, an exercise program, and the list of physical requirements Dani must satisfy to qualify. It looks brutal. She tucks the papers in the pocket of her lab coat. Gets to her feet.

"Thank you, Doctor."

"You might as well call me 'Erin,' Dr. Jackson. I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot of each other."

"When I hit the wall with this?" she asks, smiling fiercely. "Don't worry, Erin. I can do this. And it's 'Dani.'"

She inspects the diet list thoroughly when she gets back to her office. 'No caffeine.' Well, she'll leave that till last.

She indulges her workaholicism to the extent of working seven days a week, but no more than a full shift a day. She does a light workout -- mostly stretching -- each day before she settles at her desk and a heavy one -- two hours -- at night before she leaves. Erin's recommendation was for a one-hour workout every other day. It's one of the things on the checklist Dani ignores. She really doesn't have the time to waste.

For the first two weeks of her new regime she's sure she's going to die, even though she doesn't do much more than walk on the treadmill. She was a member of a health club in DC and went three times a week. Obviously it wasn't enough to really keep her in shape. But she's sleeping better now than she has in years, and her appetite's back, so she can keep up with the diet list.

Progress.

#

John runs in the mornings.

She's up by five these days. Ten years of getting Jack out the door dressed, provisioned, accessorized, and caffeinated has pretty much destroyed her old habits, and if she's going to get in a workout and a shower and breakfast before hitting her desk at nine she has to be there no later than six-thirty. She's standing in the kitchen, savoring her first cup of morning rocket fuel, when she sees a figure flash by the window. The living room has sliding glass doors opening onto a fenced patio. She opens the patio gate and peers out. The figure's nearly out of sight, but she's sure she knows him anyway.

She knows him. One of the universe's better jokes. The next day she stations herself by her kitchen window, gets a good look, and confirms her hunch. Running shoes. Shorts. MIT t-shirt, already sweat-darkened.

And obviously not a damned thing wrong with his knees.

#

One of the useful things about having the skills of a whole secret former life to draw on is nobody knows you're doing it. Tactical assessment, threat assessment, recon, the whole military thing? Everybody knows John Nielsen's a civilian and always was. So nobody notices him carefully map out Dani's habits and adjust his own to avoid her. (Don't want to spook the target, after all.) But since he's doing all this avoiding, he knows exactly where she is at almost every hour of the day. What the hell is she doing in the gym for two hours every night? _Nobody_ needs two hours of gym time every night. They didn't spend that much time there when they were on SG-1.

He thinks about that. No. She can't be serious. She's taken back AA&T. (There was a betting pool, both on 'if' and 'when.' He'd won fifty bucks on a long shot combination bet: 'yes,' and 'within the first week or seven day period following her arrival, whichever comes first.') She can't be intending to run AA&T _and_ be angling for a Gate Team assignment.

Can she?

He goes to see the General.

His relationship with Carter is complicated. She's General Carter, now, and the loneliness of command (he knows too well) isn't a myth. In the instances where the military promotes one officer over another -- to the point where, say, a former Major ranks her former CO -- they certainly don't leave them in the same chain of command. He's a problem for her, and certainly one she'd rather not have. John Nielsen isn't her friend and former CO, but in a way, he is. (Weird and awkward. About par for the SGC.) Still, they'll make the best of it they can. He has confidence in her. After all, he trained her.

It's damned hard to keep thinking of it as someone else's life now that he's back here.

She invites him in. Offers him a seat. "What can I do for you, Dr. Nielsen?"

"Dani wants you to put her on a Gate Team, doesn't she? General?" There's no point in beating around the bush.

"Would there be any point at all in telling you it's none of your business, Doctor?" He sees Carter sigh and rub her eyes. She fiddles with the glasses lying on the desk. (Those are new.) "Oh my God, now I know how General Hammond felt when Dani used to come charging into his office with her latest obsession."

He grins. "I learned from the best, Carter."

She groans faintly. Picks up the glasses and puts them on. Glares at him half-heartedly. (They make her look like a rabid librarian.) Takes them off again. "Okay. Yes. She's trying to qualify. I've told her if she _does_ qualify, I'll assign her."

He rises halfway out of his chair. "Carter, are you out of your _mind_ \--"

She raises a hand. " _Doctor_. Relax. She'll never qualify. Hunnicutt won't pass her, I'll have kept my promise and everything will be fine. She, ah, told me I ought to send you Out There, by the way."

"What?" The change of subject catches him by surprise.

"She recommended your assignment to a Gate Team." Carter taps one of the folders in front of her. "So here you are. SG-35. Its specific mandate is the acquisition of alien technology. McCluskey, Hamilton, and Hicks. Hamilton's your ethicist and negotiator; Hicks is another engineer. He's military; his specialty is power systems, so the two of you should make a good team. Colonel McCluskey's got Black Ops experience, so the two of you ought to get along too. I trust you won't have any trouble taking orders from a woman?"

"Hey, Carter, I used to be married. But which one's the A/T Specialist?"

It occurs to him -- belatedly -- the 'John Nielsen' act has slipped pretty thoroughly just now, but it seems kind of idiotic to play 'Let's Pretend' with Carter. She seems to agree, because she doesn't miss a beat. "SG-35 doesn't have one. Both McCluskey and Hamilton have some languages -- McCluskey was a field interrogator -- and I know you remember a little _Goa'uld_ and Ancient. But your mandate is to -- so we hope -- deal with _advanced_ cultures. Ones you'll be able to talk to. The need for an archaeologist and translator shouldn't arise."

They cover the nuts and bolts of his new assignment, and it's only after he's been dismissed he realizes he never raised the most telling point with Carter. She might think Indy won't qualify, but even though she and Indy were best friends for years -- and probably still are -- there are ways in which he knows Indiana better than she ever will. She'll qualify. And then Carter will either have to assign her to a Team or break any promises she's made -- and he knows Carter well enough to know she won't break a promise. So pretty soon Indy's going to be on the other side of the Gate without anybody to protect her. Anybody qualified, that is -- by which he means _him_ , and call it _hubris_ if you like, but he had seven years of watching her six and -- more to the point -- hearing about just what she got up to when he wasn't around to do it. Sometimes she didn't mean to. Sometimes she did. The fact is, Dr. Jackson doesn't follow orders. She takes suggestions under advisement, and sometimes that doesn't work out all that well. If you don't know that going in -- and aren't prepared to head her off at the pass -- things can go either spectacularly well...

Or not.

Why does she want to go back out there in the first place? It's been ten years.

Crap.

#

When Nielsen leaves, Sam really wants a drink. Or maybe just to bang her head against the wall. Why didn't he just ask her to pass Dani a note during study hall? Dammit. The boy's got it bad. Maybe the two of them should just... No.

Never happen. Dani's too sensible for that.

At least, Sam hopes to God she is.

#

The next time Dani sees Nielsen he's in BDUs. Monday morning. Commissary. Breakfast. She has a healthy (disgusting) breakfast piled on her tray. He's sitting with three people she knows vaguely. It's SG-35; one of the new teams -- which means (she guesses) the proposal up before the Funding Commission got off the ground. Jack bitched about the mandate of the new teams while the proposal was still in committee: they're not exploration or support teams; their function's strictly to acquire tasty new alien technology. It's what the hardliners in Committee have always wanted the SGC's primary mandate to be. What she's fought so hard against all her life.

Nielsen glances up as she passes their table. Raised eyebrow. Bland expression. She knows he knows exactly what she's thinking.

From breakfast she goes into the first meeting of the week: pre-mission prep and assignment for the Teams. Sammy and all the Department Heads are there. Both she and Amelia are still covering AA&T for a few more weeks. She leafs through the folders in front of her.

"SG-35 doesn't have an A/T specialist," she notes, looking over the personnel list. McCluskey, Hamilton, Hicks, and Nielsen. Their first mission's this week. All of them are veterans of the Gate, except for (supposedly) Nielsen, but 35's a newly-formed unit.

"Major Hamilton has a doctorate in ethics, Dani. He's attached to 35 to keep them from getting out of line," Sammy says.

So the newest Loot-and-Shoot Team will have a voice of conscience. Which is reassuring, but not as reassuring as having someone with them who can read the signposts that say: _"Danger: Hazardous Materials."_ She catches Sammy's frown and lets it go. If McCluskey will listen to Nielsen, they should stay out of trouble.

After the meeting, she debates with herself for a full fifteen minutes before going to 19.

#

She's never been to his lab. It looks a lot like Sammy's did back in the day. Some incomprehensible alien gadget is spread out on his workbench, and he's engrossed. _Goa'uld_. The Empire may be in ruins, but the artifacts go on forever. She knocks at the doorframe, quietly. He straightens up. Sees her. Waits.

"Congratulations," she says. "SG-35."

He smiles just a little. "I understand I have you to thank." He gestures. "Come on in."

She takes a cautious step into the lab. "How's the ... Colonel?"

"She seems like a nice enough Colonel. You know these Air Force types. She's a Marine, actually. And Hicks is Army. Hamilton's a flyboy, though. I'm the only one who hasn't gotten the speech about inter-corps cooperation."

She smiles at that.

"You didn't come all the way down here just to say hello," he says.

 _One whole floor._ "You'll be going out without an A/T Specialist," she tells him. She's not entirely sure why she _is_ here.

"Not every team has them," he says.

"Mining teams. Support teams. Science teams. You're a First Contact team."

"For really advanced aliens we can talk to. Or at least moderately advanced aliens. That we can still talk to."

"But are you going to understand them? Not just what they say, but what they _mean_? A culture isn't just words. It's symbols and patterns. They way they act, the way they dress, the way they build -- that's going to tell you as much about them as what they say. Even if they're speaking English--" She's said these same things to him so many times before. He must be tired of hearing them by now.

"Why are we the ones having this conversation? Shouldn't you, oh, mention these little things to Carter?"

"Dammit, Jack, do you think I haven't?" she snaps.

#

He sees her realize what she's done; she looks horrified. "John. I'm sorry. John."

She slipped; he slipped. It's the same lecture she'd given him (given The Other Guy) on a hundred worlds about understanding alien cultures. He'd answered her almost the way he would have then: _and why don't you go tell Carter this stuff, Indiana?_ And she called him 'Jack.' He wants to close the distance between them, put his arms around her, tell her it's all right, he _is_ Jack. And he knows he can't, because Jack -- _her_ Jack -- is dead.

"Never mind. Some days it's hard for me to remember, too. Anyway, your point?" _'Come on, Indiana, get to the point. None of us is getting any younger here...'_ Except he did.

"You're going to get into trouble out there ... John. I think you'll know it before they do. You... you always did." She smiles at him as if it hurts, and it nearly breaks his heart. "Just try to make them listen to you, okay? Keep them safe?"

"McCluskey's a good cautious officer. We'll all do our best. Nobody wants to see a repeat of that rogue NID operation on the SGC's watch." Something else John Nielsen shouldn't know. But it's a fine line to walk, and right now the important thing is to reassure her everything's going to be okay. She's worried about him -- about them -- and that's her job. He's glad she cares.

"Sure." She hesitates, ready to leave.

"Dani?" he says. She stops.

"You're looking for a Team posting too. Aren't you?"

There's a long pause. Then she nods.

"Why?"

"I was happy then," she says softly.

He's still trying to find something to say to that when she walks out.

#

October. Back two months today. Dr. Hunnicutt's surprised and pleased with her progress, but Dani knows she still has a long way to go.

She's gotten used to seeing John Nielsen. Can't avoid seeing him -- she briefs his team. But she sees him more than that, because Science and Engineering and Archaeology and Linguistics have always had an incestuous relationship -- Level 19 may drag in the alien toys, but Level 18 has to read the instruction manuals to them. She could bump the work the new teams -- 32 through 35 -- bring back off on the other people in her department, but she doesn't. She's the best qualified. When they do manage to get their hands on something, it's almost always something Earth has never seen before. New languages. New cultures.

Her specialty.

#

__

_**

III. Now, Voyager

**_

__

She touches something and she screams. Force throws her backward across the floor of the Special Materials Lab. She can't _see_.

"Oh, jeeze, Doctor-- Doctor Jackson--"

_"Indy!"_

Someone's helping her sit up. She feels herself cradled against a familiar chest. (Shouldn't be. Is.) All she can see are gold and purple blotches, and she thinks in a moment something's going to hurt, and she doesn't know how much, and she's a little bit afraid. "John?"

"I don't know what happened, Dr. Nielsen. She just touched it; we were trying to open it up and get the control panel--"

"Did you tell her not to touch it?"

"Well I thought she--"

"Get a medical team. Oh, crap, never mind."

_Hot._

#

John's carries her up to the Infirmary as if she were a fainting maiden, and the relief and the familiarity of that are so unbearable she's grateful for both the pain and the drugs. They give her other things to think about. She lies on the hospital bed, regarding the world blurrily -- she's lost her glasses -- through a fading scrim of green and purple splotches. Her hands are swathed in gauze and covered with numbing gel. A nurse is busy prepping her for an IV, because Erin says she's going to need the big guns. Meanwhile Erin's given her a sedative, and it makes everything -- including the pain -- seem vaguely amusing.

Her vision is coming back -- the blindness was caused by the activating flash as the Cuirassi weather-control machine opened and came on-line. The damage to her hands is another matter; from fingertips to wrist they're burned and blistered. Erin isn't pleased. "You won't be using those for a couple of weeks," she says.

"Weeks?" Dani says incredulously.

"They're bad burns, Dani. What did you do?"

"Andrews should have made sure it was safe before letting her anywhere near it," John snarls.

"What happened?" Sammy demands, sweeping in.

"She _touched_ something," John says, and for a moment, though Dani's worked hard -- and generally successfully -- to separate the two of them, it isn't John, it's _Jack_. It isn't now, it's _then_. Sammy isn't the General, she's just Sammy, and in a moment Teal'c will come through the door to stand at the foot of her bed and life will be good again, even though she's back in the Infirmary.

When did all the good days become the past days? She shakes her head. No. She won't live in the past. The past spools inevitably onward, into a later past she doesn't want to revisit. She'll stay in the present.

The nurse strongarms her flat, slips the needle into her arm and tapes it into place. Dani blinks up at the hanging bag. It looks as if it's only saline, but she doesn't trust it. You can slip too many things into saline, and just as she thinks that, here comes Erin with a needle. She injects it into the port, causing Dani to miss most of Lt. Andrews's explanation of what just happened.

"Is it shut down now?" Sammy asks.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Is that going to happen again?"

"Well I-- I don't _think_ so, ma'am."

"Why don't you and Dr. Nielsen make sure? Then Dr. Mertz can help you figure it out."

"Sammy!" Dani wails, struggling to sit up again, although she's starting to feel a little drunk. "I saw it first!"

#

Just like old times. Indy's in the bed and the rest of them are hovering. Not too badly hurt, all things considered. He wonders if he should take it as a good sign that she remembered his ... _new_ ... name this time. Dammit, Andrews was on the team that _acquired_ the gadget. He should have paid more attention. And she shouldn't have just gone charging in. How many times has he -- all right, _O'Neill_ \-- told her not to touch something before it's been threat-assessed? Not enough, obviously.

There's more on her mind right now than having gotten knocked on her ass by another alien device and not getting to play with it any more, though. He saw the bottle; Hunnicutt's just loaded her up with enough Valium she'd probably tell Anubis every secret she has, and she's glancing from him to Carter and looking ... well, _guilty_ isn't exactly the word. More a combination of haunted and determined. The way she was back in the beginning. When they were looking for Skaara.

_Indy, what's wrong this time? What the hell do you think you're going to find on the other side of the Galaxy that you can't find here?_

Carter assigns Mertz to the Cuirassi project. Indy wails that it isn't fair -- sounding about six, the way she always does when she's good and hopped-up. Hunnicutt points out she's on medical leave until she can work. Probably at least two weeks, depending on how fast she heals.

"And you're staying with me until then," Carter says. "That way I can keep an eye on you."

Indy flops back against the pillows. Sulking. "I want my glasses," she mutters. He slips out and goes to look for them.

He's in luck; they aren't even broken. She'd better order a couple of backup pairs, though, especially if she qualifies for a Team. He tucks them into a pocket. About then Andrews comes in. He looks at John curiously. "Dr. Nielsen, I was wondering ... did you know Dr. Jackson ... before?"

 _And here we go._ "Before what, Lieutenant?"

"Well, before you were here."

"I don't see where I could have met her. Wasn't she in Washington with General O'Neill?"

John Nielsen went to High School in Colorado Springs -- his cover story, if anyone asks, is that he grew up here; he knows the right areas at the right times (partly because of Charlie; it's a bitter joke that his new body -- his _only_ body -- makes him the same age Charlie would have been, _should_ have been) so it works. College in Massachusetts. Recruited from a R &D think-tank out in Livermore, California that head-hunted him out of college; it was the one with the best toys. He's never been anywhere near DC.

"Well, yes. But she was at the SGC before that," Andrews tells him, just as if Dani's past weren't a matter of public knowledge. It's passing, as John watches, into something between myth and fairy tale: _'Once upon a time there lived The Legendary Dr. Jackson, the woman who opened the Stargate...'_ And she lived and died and was resurrected and saved Earth a number of times and found true love and didn't get to live happily ever after.

"And -- let me see -- I would have been in High School. I'll be back in a couple of minutes. Why don't we see if we can isolate the main power core before we bother Dr. Mertz? If we keep frying A/T specialists, General Carter's going to start docking our pay."

He goes back up to the Infirmary, thinking about the gap between reality and fiction -- though in his past life, it was usually the difference between the mission and the mission report. They've finished putting Indy to bed. Carter's gone. A General's work is never done, John guesses. He can't imagine having been a General; part of the road not taken. Indiana said he was a General in the Alternate Universe she visited once; the one where Apophis destroyed the Earth. He's just as glad to have skipped being a General here. He sits down by the bed. She looks up at him, heavy-lidded; the Valium must be taking hold. He's glad; he saw her hands when he picked her up off the floor; they were pretty thoroughly fried. He knows she hates morphine with a passion, but she'll need it soon. He suspects Hunnicutt wants to see how much nerve damage there is first.

"They drugged me," Indy says, her voice slurred now. "Erin says it's going to hurt."

"Burns always do," he says. "I brought your glasses." He sets them on the table beside the bed; she won't be needing them. She can barely keep her eyes open. A Valium-drunk is one of the most pleasant highs in the world. He's never liked or trusted anything to do with being laced up with drugs -- but God knows he's had enough experience over the years. His and the Other Guy's.

"I don't want to go stay with Sammy," she says. Whining. Sulking wildly. Something she always does when she's hurt but isn't feeling too bad.

"You'll like it," he says. "She'll bake you cookies." Carter always liked to cook. Good at it, too.

Her eyes open wide. The pupils are blown. She starts to sit up. He puts a hand on her shoulder, easing her back down.

"No, she won't. She won't have time. Generals never have time. Whatever you do, Johnny-boy, don't become a General. You won't like it."

"I promise, Indy. I won't become a General."

"Good," she says, turning her face toward his hand. "Go to sleep," she says, as if she's ordering him.

"You do that, sweetheart," he answers. Her eyes close and her breathing slows. He stays until he's sure she's out, then he heads back down to Special Materials, and he and Andrews -- and, after a few hours, Mertz -- get a good start on the Cuirassi device, but part of his mind's elsewhere. Wondering what Indy was thinking about, and what she meant.

#

Eleven days after the accident she's back at work. While she's out on medical leave, papers and a check come from her lawyer: the cabin's been sold. One more link severed. And at her asking price, too. Nice, though really, it hadn't been extortionate. She doesn't know who bought it -- there's no name on the papers, just another lawyer -- and she hopes it hasn't sold to some developer who will pave the lake with condos. Not her problem though. When she deposits the check -- Sammy's provided her with a car and driver (mostly to keep her quiet, Dani thinks) -- and updates her financials, her financial advisor tells her the amount of money she's holding onto from the sale of two properties in the same tax year could be a real problem if she doesn't do something. She's bought a residence property, but apparently that isn't good enough. Has she considered, he asks, buying real estate for investment? ( _As if I have time to manage real estate,_ she thinks.) She explains about the house she's waiting for. It has sentimental value to her, and it's the one she wants. The only one.

Her financial advisor asks her if she's considered paying the current owners to move. She thinks about that during the rest of her convalescence. Not much of one, since only her hands are injured, but an awkward one, since there's not a lot you can do for yourself without your hands. Not hold a book, or a spoon, or a coffee cup -- at least without pain. And after the first few days, there's physical therapy -- squeezing a ball -- so scar tissue won't build up and cause permanent damage. Visits to the Academy Hospital, so the bandages can be changed. Pills, when the pain's too bad. Business as usual. In between, she takes a lot of long walks. Just as well, as she can't do much else in the way of exercise. But she walks for miles each day, and sleeps well at night.

Thinks of John.

Thinks of Jack.

Thinks of Daniel.

Always back to Daniel, who started things unraveling so spectacularly. If Daniel had never come, stepping from his universe into hers, SG-1 would never have gone to Kheb. If they'd never gone to Kheb, would she ever have followed Jack to Washington? If Daniel had never been here -- and died here -- Ascended -- would she ever even have asked Jack to wait for her? No. She thinks not. She'd always known Jack loved her, in his way. She'd wanted it to be in _her_ way, but it couldn't be, because of SG-1, the SGC, the military. Better to yearn without close examination. Better maybe, even, to want without having. Except for Daniel, her quantum twin, and the greatest pain he brought her was by leaving her. All the time she had him, such a short time, was sweet. _Enchanted April,_ her mind supplies sardonically. _Anything can be beautiful if it's brief enough. And long ago enough._

When Erin clears her for duty, Sammy drives her to the Mountain one last time. Erin's given her permission to return to work, so long as she's careful of her hands. They're still bandaged, but she has the use of her fingers again. That evening she drives back to Sammy's -- Sammy's staying late, _quelle surprise_ \-- clears out all the possessions that have accumulated there over the last almost two weeks, and drives home. The solitude's a blessing. She was alone most of the time at Sammy's place anyway -- the General works long hours, who knew? -- but this is _her_ solitude. She wanders through her rooms, putting away her things. When she's done, she goes to the bedroom, to the closet, to the small boxes marked in large black letters "Do Not Open." They're still sealed firmly. They have been for a long time, some for years. She opens them now. They're filled with photographs. Memories.

Her and Jack -- was she ever really that young? Sammy. Jack alone, trying to avoid the camera and failing. Teal'c, in one of the many fashion-forward hats he got from god knew where. Skaara. Sha're. They'd managed to save and enhance the images caught by the camcorder Sammy brought on the Second Abydos Mission. They're the only pictures she has of her sister. (The only picture she had for years of her brother.) Another picture of Skaara, taken at his wedding. Nothing to give away the fact this is on a planet light-years from Earth. Neshat's glowing with happiness; Kasuf looks so proud. All dead, now. She arranges the photos on top of her dresser. Her families. Both of them. Both gone.

At the bottom of the box, beneath everything else, there's a battered stuffed bear with a fedora, leather jacket, and whip. She takes it out and sets it on the bed. Indiana Jackson, he'd called her. They'd barely gone on half-a-dozen missions, not even that, before he'd come up with the name (it was on Simarka if her memory still serves; that was early; she still hadn't had her apartment completely unpacked.) Shortened quickly to Indiana, or Indy. She can count on the fingers of one hand the times he called her 'Danielle', and one of them was on her wedding day. _'I, Jonathan, take thee, Danielle...'_

The box is empty, now. She sets it aside. The second box is very small. Three framed photos. A leather pouch. A videotape cassette. A letter. The photos are of Daniel.

Daniel in BDUs, standing in her office. _(She'd said she wanted a picture. He'd pulled off his patches; he's holding them in his hand. It was automatic; a response drilled into him by his Jack O'Neill, just as the corresponding behavior had been into her by hers. Security. She'd taken the picture. Alternate Her; an endlessly-fascinating concept.)_ Daniel in her old apartment, sprawled out on her couch, nine-tenths asleep, a book against his chest, glasses pushed up on his forehead. _(It could really be anyone, but she remembers the day so clearly.)_ Her and Daniel together. _(Sammy took that one, so it's probably at Sammy's house, but it's too much of a closeup to tell; no background visible. They'd been arguing about something, she thinks, from the expression on Daniel's face. He's looking down. She's laughing. She never did take a good picture. Always had to say something just when the shutter clicked. Or move.)_ She sets the photos among the rest of her collection. It's all right to display them now. They can hurt no one who matters.

She picks up the leather bag. It's from her collection of artifacts; a medicine bag made by a tribe of primitive natives on one of the planets they visited. Originally it held herbs. Now it holds some of the stones that killed Daniel. (Ghoulish. Sue her.) The tape shows the day and moment of his death, captured forever by the MALP. (The SGC held on to archaic technology for its own incomprehensible reasons; she doesn't own anything that can play the cassette, and just having it could earn her a quick trip to Leavenworth if the powers that be really want to be pissy. She doesn't actually care.) The letter is the letter Daniel wrote her, the one Sammy gave her after he ... left. Telling her that she is good, and to be happy.

If the first were really true, then the second would be possible, right?

If Jack had lived, would the two of them be happy now? The fantasy pulls her under with the sudden terrible force of a riptide. It's Now, but Jack did not die. He retired, they got rid of everything in Washington, they went up to the cabin. Weeks passed as they spent long lazy days not-fishing and taking rambles through the woods. Dozing in front of the fireplace in the evenings. Slowly the haggardness and the anger faded from his face. And one day he said: _"Hey, Indy. Why don't you get Carter on the line. See if she and T would like to come up for the weekend?"_

And she answered: _"I'd like that, Jack."_

And they do come, and everything's fine, and everything's fine with Jack, and nothing's ever bad again for ever and ever and ever. She closes her eyes, because this, _this_ is the way it should have gone, and the tears she could not cry at the hotel--

_\--his body on the ground already starting to cool and it's not Jack, he's already gone, and people are pulling her away and wanting her to sit down and for god's sake, don't they think she's seen somebody die before--_

\--the tears she could not cry at the funeral--

_\--honor guard and visiting dignitaries, even Secret Service; she's wearing black; hat and a veil; sunglasses, too, though the day is overcast; not because she's crying, but because she isn't, and she won't have them endlessly speculate about why she cried or why she didn't; they should be the ones weeping: the king has gone into the earth--_

\--the tears she could not cry at the cabin--

_\--spring when she came; he planned it that way; said he wouldn't make her start their retirement with a Minnesota winter, and so she's there all alone imagining how he'd tell her about it, imagining his voice every time she sees a new flower, or the ripple of wind across the lake, and the silence stops up every sound she can imagine making, gagging her with the crushing weight of being incomplete until she is not only mute, but barely able to breathe--_

\--spill down her face at last. She wails like something demented, rocking back and forth on the edge of the bed and pressing a pillow against her face to muffle the sound, cries until not even the most ruthless flagellation of memory can produce another tear and then, exhausted, chest and ribs aching, kicks off her shoes and climbs under the covers, still dressed.

And the next day she goes back to work.

#

The scribe wrote that a house built upon a foundation of sand could not endure. Her world is built upon a foundation of sugar. Sugar doesn't simply shift. It melts. And not under pressure. Under atmospheric changes. A little rain, some increased humidity, and your house doesn't just topple, it sinks. And there's nothing you can do about it.

Her relationship with John is changing. And there's nothing she can do about it. Not stop the changes. Not control them. Even leaving won't do it, because the relationship will still be there. The only thing that will have any measurable effect is if she murders him or kills herself, and she's not absolutely certain that would be sufficient. When she looks at him now, she doesn't know who she sees. And it's driving her absolutely crazy. (Been there more than once. Wore out the t-shirt.)

She ought to be sure.

Or sure she doesn't care.

Or simply not care.

#

It's the end of October. She hasn't lost too much ground on her personal training program. They've gotten a new archaeo-linguist for AA&T, because Amelia's finally admitting -- publicly -- that she's leaving. She says she wants to spend more time with her family, which Dani knows is a lie, but let the woman keep her secrets if she wants to. The new boy's a few years older than Dani. Dr. Claudius Winchester of Boston. Here on the strength of having finally cracked Linear A. Dani's been able to read Linear A for almost twenty years. It's a _Goa'uld_ dialect. Winchester's not wildly pleased when she tells him. Demands to know why she didn't publish. Rants about scholarship and her duty to science. She points out that he signed a large stack of promises to keep his mouth shut when he joined the circus, and so did she. And someday (Disclosure's been an "any day now" thing for the last fifteen years; she suspects "any day" will never come) the walls will all come tumbling down and they can both publish to their hearts' content (if they live that long). Meanwhile they should just do the work they're being paid to do. Instead of him wasting her time with his tantrums.

Oh, god, she remembers these conversations. She used to take the Winchester side -- halfway to tears -- with General Hammond. And General Hammond said most of the same things to her she's saying to him now, though probably more gently.

When the hell did she become what she'd always fought so hard against?

#

__

_**

IV. It's a Wonderful Life

**_

__

"You shouldn't be lifting until the last of the bandages come off."

It's after her shift. She's down in the Weight Room. Walking's all very well, but resistance training's what she needs to build muscle mass. "Bite me," she shoots back automatically. (Even though he's right.) The skin on her palms burns. She should have bought lifting gloves, but they wouldn't have fit over the bandages, and anyway, she just hadn't thought.

John sits down on the bench next to hers. She racks the bar. She's lifting a qualifying weight now, but she can't yet manage a qualifying number of repetitions. He takes her wrist, drags her hand away from the bar. "Good job, kiddo. You're bleeding."

She pulls her hand free. Pinpricks of blood dot her palm through the gauze. Not too bad. "What are you doing here?" she demands. He's never -- exactly -- touched her before. Not if you don't count carrying her to the Infirmary. She's not counting that.

"Gate Team. Got to stay in shape. Speaking of which, just how far do you think you're gonna get if you have to pass a Psych check too?"

She pushes herself into a sitting position, staring at him in dismay. She glances around quickly to make sure no one can hear their conversation -- they aren't alone in here. "I'm fine." He doesn't say anything, but she can read his expression clearly: _oh, not like I haven't heard that before..._ He's never heard that from her before. But he has. Like her and Daniel, she and John have a shared history without ever having met. "You wouldn't."

"You know the answer to that. Go home, watch a movie--"

"Get a life, John? Have some fun? Been there, tried that, came back here." She slides off the bench and stands. He stands with her.

"Must have worked out really great for you if the only thing you can think of to do now is jump through the Stargate," he says.

#

She flinches as if he's slapped her. But the pieces are starting to fall into place. Something went wrong. How could something have gone wrong when the Other Guy was there to take care of her? That's what happened, though. He's becoming certain of it. Carter can't see it. Indy could always manage to fool Carter at least some of the time. And besides, Carter's got a lot on her plate these days. Some things are just going to fall through the cracks.

"Wedded bliss," Indy snaps, biting off each syllable, and she's furious now. Her pupils have gone wide; there's only a thin ring of blue left. "And jumping through the Stargate's my _job_. I'm damned good at it. I want it back."

"Go home," he repeats. He won't even have to find a way to backchannel the idea of adding a psych eval to the list of Dr. Jackson's pass/fail requirements for a Gate Team if Hunnicutt finds out she's torn the skin off her hands working out. Self-mutilation. An automatic downcheck.

She sighs, dropping her chin to her chest and wrapping her arms around herself. An old gesture, one she'd outgrown years ago. She's still angry, though. "I suppose you'll be along later to make sure I have. And to tuck me into bed and kiss me goodnight." She turns and walks -- _strides_ \-- away.

#

Jack always said she had a death-wish. Oh, god, is she out of her _mind_? Bad enough she has to work with John. The least she could do is treat him with professional courtesy. As if they were strangers.

She leaves the Mountain without stopping to shower or change, just throws her coat on over her workout clothes and leaves her civilian clothes behind. She wears civilian clothes to work these days. Not on a Gate Team, after all. Not yet. Not _ever_ if she does something John doesn't like. The implicit threat was clear. And she knows exactly what John won't like. This is October 26, 2014; about twenty years ago last March she was driven up to Cheyenne Mountain for the very first time. Spring in Colorado; after Berkeley she'd nearly frozen to death. It wasn't half as cold as the look in Jack O'Neill's eyes the first time he saw her.

Who _is_ John Nielsen? Who does he think he is when he looks in the mirror? She rummages through old memories of SG-1's bizarre confrontation with the fifteen-year-old Jack O'Neill. They'd thought the clone was him at first. So had the clone (John). But it's twelve years later; he's become someone else.

Hasn't he?

She reaches home in record time. Speeding, but she's lucky. And she's gotten her plates changed over, so she doesn't have the out-of-state plates to attract extra attention from the cops. After all these years, she knows where the speed traps are, anyway. She parks, goes in, fixes herself a drink, even though alcohol's one of the Thou Shalt Nots on the new regime. Takes it with her into the bathroom to unbandage her hands. The left one's swollen and sore, but there's no blood. The right one's oozing slightly, blood welling up from the raw skin of the palm. She runs cold water over them, hissing at the pain. She'll bandage them again after she showers. They'll be all right in the morning. _She'll_ be all right in the morning.

Sure she will.

She's falling apart.

It's been eight months. Two-hundred forty days. A hundred days is the prescribed period of mourning on a planet called Edora, where Jack was marooned once, and she was convinced for years afterward (she never told anyone) that it was her fault. Jack died on February 10th; he was buried on Valentine's Day and if she ever told anyone how appropriate she thinks that is, they'd lock her up. _My heart's in the grave._

The dead should lie down in their graves. But it's October now. The Feast of the Dead is coming -- next week, in fact -- and she works with a dead man daily. Or ... some strange re-engineered -- oh, _there's_ a simile -- time-traveler: Jack taken from a moment out of their shared past and changed: Jack as he never was. Could have been. Different. But too much the same. Too easy to love. Too damned convenient. And just who -- or what -- is she betraying if she does? Herself? Jack? Even--

_\--oh god don't think of--_

Daniel? Because all along in the back of her mind there's been the knowledge that Daniel, her constant, inviolate, fantasy lover, isn't dead -- not alive, no, but not dead, and she can use the Stargate to go look for him. To go to Kheb.

The water beats down on her shoulders, but it doesn't ease any tension. She grieves wildly for the life she and Jack were supposed to have had, but -- more and more these days -- she can't mourn Jack himself, because every instinct tells her he isn't dead. John. Voice, inflection, body language are the same -- they can't lie to an anthropologist and linguist. But there's a twelve-year gap in shared knowledge -- and especially of a decade of bed and board -- that makes him seem like a stranger. As if Jack, returned from the dead, has decided to call it quits. It isn't logical, but feelings never are. At least one thing in her life makes sense now. She understands her drive to get back through the Gate. She knows what's out there now. Self-knowledge is a wonderful thing, isn't it? What would she do on Kheb, anyway? Only one thing to do there, as if it were a small town somewhere. She wasn't interested in Ascension fourteen years ago, but things have changed, haven't they? There was something to hold her to the world, then.

 _First you have to release your burden,_ Daniel said.

 _And die?_ she'd asked.

_It's not really death._

She steps out of the shower, ignoring her reflection in the mirror. _"Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images."_ Daniel was her quantum double, but he hadn't come through the Mirror. He'd arrived because of an interrupted path to Ascension, and he'd left the same way. Somewhere in the quantum web of universes there's one in which her parents had a boy instead of a girl, and that boy grew up to join the Stargate Program and died because of an accident on Kelowna. Only he didn't die, quite.

Just as Jack didn't die.

Quite.

In silk pajamas and cashmere robe -- fancy, suitable, and warm: leftovers from her last incarnation -- she wanders back to the living room, drink in hand, barefoot, hands all bandaged again. They throb, but she ignores them. She turns on the sound system. The soprano starts singing in Italian about love and death. That's pretty much her life.

_'It's not really death.'_

_'First you must release your burdens.'_

She'd like to release her burdens. She keeps letting go of things, but nothing she lets go of seems to be enough to lessen the crushing weight of simply _having to be alive_. She feels as if she's the one they buried, not Jack, and she remembers the uncomplicated joy (knowing her mind, her memory, is tricking her; letting it) of being with Daniel. If she does Ascend -- if she _can_ Ascend -- will Daniel be waiting for her? Is that what she wants?

An hour later her doorbell rings.

Mountainview's a large complex, and all the units look pretty much alike. People -- new residents, guests -- are always getting lost. She goes to the door and opens it without thought.

"Still as security-conscious as ever, I see."

John's standing on her doorstep, wearing clothes that bring past-Jack and husband-Jack crashing unsettlingly against each other in her mind. Topcoat. Tweed blazer. Polo shirt. Khakis. She simply stares.

"As I recall, you invited me to tuck you in. And we need to talk," he says.

She steps back. He steps in. "Can I take your coat?" she says automatically. He gives her a strange look, and suddenly she's aware of herself not as she is now, but as the woman John knows best: SG-1's archaeo-linguist; a woman who knows nothing of Washington protocol or political airs and graces and doesn't want to, either. A woman who was buried long ago. She points at the coat closet silently. He can hang up his own damned coat, then. "Something to drink?"

"A beer, thanks."

He doesn't ask if she has any, but the only ones in her refrigerator are left over from the party months ago. (Beer's another thing that's off her diet list. Empty calories, Erin says.) She goes to the kitchen to get one, debates having another Scotch. But she's still a little buzzed from the first one, and gets herself a bottled water instead.

"On the wagon?" he asks when she comes back, nodding at her choice of beverage.

"Working toward qualification. If you'll let me." She sits down in a chair. He takes the couch.

"Yeah, about that. Why?"

 _I want to go to Kheb and die. 'It's not really death...'_ Not only that. Maybe not even that. But Kheb's part of it. "The usual reasons. To explore the Galaxy, to see new worlds, to do good--"

"You've done all that. At least seven years of it."

"Eight-something, actually. Plus a few day-trips over the years to keep my hand in." Jack had been livid when he'd found out. They'd fought about that because there were other things they didn't dare fight about. "Why should I stop now? It's what I do best. So I thought--"

"Save the snow job for Carter."

His casual dismissal of her explanation before he's even heard her out jars her. The anger's never far below the surface when she's around him--

_\--doesn't listen; just like Jack--_

\--and it's cognitive dissonance, hearing those words and cadences while seeing this well-dressed, fresh-faced, unscarred young man. Jack was generally disheveled -- at best -- while out of uniform and had no patience with dressing up.

All those years of Dress Blues every day.

"You're John Nielsen, what the hell do you care?" she snaps. John. Yes. He's John.

"Because we both know I'm not really John Nielsen." Ugly truths should be shouted, screamed, sobbed in broken whispers. He says it quietly, matter-of-factly. "You know who I am. I'm tired of pretending. I'll do it with everyone else, Indy. Not with you."

#

She jerks to her feet as if somebody's yanked on her strings and stares at him as if she's just been shot, or is just about to be. Her eyes are as blue as he's ever seen them, though there's no expression in them, only intensity. She walks to where he's sitting and sinks down again, just as if those same strings have been cut, until she's kneeling at his feet. Rests her cheek against his knee, her hands in her lap. He rests his hand against her hair. He's wanted just to be able to touch her for so long.

"I have to go," she says. She's answering his question with something a little closer to the truth this time.

"Why?" he asks. She shakes her head beneath his hand. Isn't going to tell him or doesn't know. Maybe a little of both. His girl always was a seat-of-the pants flyer back in the old days. Getting to the right answer on instinct and then having to work back to figure out how she got there. Made for some interesting debriefings.

She _is_ his girl. She always will be. He'd loved Sara, but after Charlie, there was a space between them he could never cross again. For months he'd just gone through the motions. Not sure whether he wanted to die or was just willing (more than willing) to die when the orders came down. Dani was the one who convinced him -- insisted, back there in that cave on Abydos on that very first mission -- you always had to try to live, no matter how impossible the task seemed. He's done that ever since. He reaches down and hauls her up onto his lap. Something he'd always wanted to do and never could. Rules and regulations and guidelines. Only they don't apply between two civilian consultants, do they?

Her head rests on his shoulder. More as if she's given up than anything else. Still, at the moment he'll take what he can get.

"Tell me about being...?" she says. Her breath tickles the side of his neck. He can smell the faint neutral scent of her shampoo. Still the same one she's always used.

"Trapped?" he finishes. It's pretty much the word for what she's asking for -- the story of John Nielsen -- at least the politest one he can think of. He can tell it surprises her. She starts to sit up, but he holds her in place; one arm around her back, the other across the top of her thighs. She subsides, settling back against him, and he can tell she's thinking about what he's just said.

"'Trapped'?" she echoes after a long pause.

"The SGC set me up. Money, an on-call foster family -- I actually lived in an apartment over the garage -- enrolled in High School. I looked fifteen, you remember. Inside I was fifty-two. Cut off from everyone I knew, Poker Nights with the boys ... I couldn't buy beer, couldn't get a driver's license... As far as I remembered, last, well, about three weeks ago we'd all gotten back from our fun little visit with Lord Mot and his buddyboys -- you remember, that planet where you kept having hallucinations because of the local cuisine? -- and now I was never going to see you, Carter, or Teal'c again. Lunch ladies in the cafeteria were giving me the death eye, and I was trying to have to remember to pay attention when the Geometry teacher called me 'Mr. Nielsen.' Fortunately I'd always liked Geometry."

"Oh, god," she whispers. "You should have--"

"No," he says. "I knew it wasn't going to be a walk in the park. O'Neill knew it too, but I don't think he understood quite as well. He wasn't the one stuck with the second case of teenaged acne. We set up rules. I stuck to them, mostly. I admit I was curious, too. A chance to live your life over, knowing what you already know -- hey, it's a common fantasy, right? You wonder what you'd do differently." He sighs. How many times in the first two years did he think of breaking his promise to O'Neill? Of going back to the SGC, demanding they send him through the Gate, somewhere, anywhere, so long as it was strange and alien enough that he could forget he was a bad copy of Jack O'Neill. But he didn't. "The thing I hadn't expected..." He stops. "I'd expected the adults to treat me as a kid. I'd already gotten a taste of that. I didn't care for it much, but the alternative was being dead, and I figured I'd grow up -- age normally, the way Thor said I would -- and in a few years it wouldn't matter. I had half a century of perspective, after all. What I wasn't expecting was for the kids to treat me like another kid. That was, okay, _weird_. The first time a girl kissed me I felt like a child molester, and she was in my home room." Indy makes a rude sound of amusement against his neck and he smiles. "I made it all the way through High School, and by then I'd figured out what I wanted to do with the next few years. I went back East to college; money wasn't a problem, and believe it or not, my grades were good. I expected the 'what's wrong with this picture' feeling to go away, but it never did. No matter what I looked like, I was always going to have about four decades on my so-called peers -- inside, where it mattered. By the time I hit, oh, say, twenty, I realized that wasn't ever going to change."

"Adults have more social mobility," she says.

He's familiar with the theory. O'Neill heard her go on about it often enough: limitation in status drives limitation in social choice; thus children, to take an example, who are low-status members of society, are restricted to socializing not only simply with other children, but with other children primarily of their own age and sex and social class. The older and higher in status you become -- adults being the highest -- the more choices of who you socialize with you develop. She's saying that as a grown-up, he could hang out with old people. He shakes his head. She can feel the gesture, even if she can't see it.

"I've got too many secrets. Where I came from, what I remember, all that stuff. I slipped up once or twice over the years. I'm supposed to have been born in 1990, for crying out loud. So I shouldn't remember getting wasted in the Seventies, and I for damned sure shouldn't talk about it. But there are just times when you can't resist making a Squeaky Fromme joke, you know?"

She waits. He knows she didn't get the reference. She didn't spend a lot of time in the US until after 1977 -- and didn't pay much attention to current events even then. He knows why -- from her security file -- but she never told him about it. He wonders if she ever told O'Neill ... later.

"So -- nutshell -- it wouldn't do to raise awkward questions," he finishes.

"About why you know things you shouldn't, and act in a way you shouldn't," she says. She's conscious of her position now, lifting her head and shifting her weight. But there's still something oddly tentative about her movements. She hasn't quite made up her mind yet whether she wants to stay on his lap or not.

"That's about it." He doesn't let go, and she isn't willing -- at least yet -- to put up a serious struggle to move. She rests her hand against his shoulder, bracing herself, but her face is turned away, as if she's pretending she isn't here. Sometimes denial keeps you sane.

"Friends? Colleagues?" she asks.

"Nobody close. Got back to the poker and beer, though. Better now that I'm ... back. Hicks and Hamilton are okay. McCluskey has her moments. The story's probably going to come out eventually, at least some of it, but it's the SGC, we can keep a lid on it here, and maybe Carter will come up with some new wacky cover story."

"Yeah," she sighs.

"So. You? Your life?" He feels her tense, as if he's touched on a guilty secret. _'Whatever you do, Johnny-boy, don't become a General. You won't like it.'_

"Jack and I got married," she says, and her words are clipped, the tone one in which you deliver a summary of unpleasant events. But he remembers her asking him to wait for her, remembers the promise that he made.

"Yeah, I already got that. O'Neill makes General, runs the SGC for a year -- damned hard to imagine -- gets packed off to Washington to run Homeworld Security -- something I can _not_ imagine doing, by the way -- you leave the SGC to go with him. You marry. You come back here. Leaves out a lot of the details." He feels her tremble, and this time she pushes hard enough -- at him, at the couch -- to free herself. Stands, and immediately sits down on the couch again -- as if standing's too much of an effort -- her back to him.

"Which details did you want?" She leans forward. Going to cry? Not quite. Always broke before she bent, back in the day. Too damned stubborn. "He had no choice," she says. "We got Elizabeth Weir -- civilian -- because of a fan-dance in Washington. General Hammond had been removed -- politics -- and Jack was frozen in a block of ice in Antarctica. Long story. Anyway, got him back, didn't get General Hammond back: they'd formed Homeworld Security and General Hammond was running that. We'd found Atlantis, and Dr. Weir was going off to run _that_. Everybody wanted Jack for the SGC. Best man for the job. Who knows who we would have gotten if he'd refused? And... he wasn't going to be able to stay in the field much longer anyway. If you refuse a promotion, they really don't want to keep you. So out or up. And at least this way, the SGC would still be safe. We'd all worked so hard to keep it safe. Keep everyone safe." She takes a deep breath and straightens up, her back still to him. "It could have been okay. But... General Hammond retired. Had to. You know, he'd been on his last tour of duty back when Apophis came through the Stargate the first time in '96. He'd just been hanging on until things were settled. So they bumped Jack up again. And he took it, again. Because Homeworld Security's oversight for the SGC, Atlantis, Area 51, the Starfleet Program, and if he didn't take Homeworld, whoever came in could cut all of them to pieces. He picked Hank Landry to run the circus, and went off to Washington."

"And you went with him."

"I followed him. He asked me to marry him, so I stayed." There's a very long silence. "We weren't happy there," she whispers at last.

Happy? He can't see how she could have expected to be. He'd always hated Washington. Couldn't wait to get away whenever he went. (He knows it wasn't him, but the memories are his.) He reaches out and pulls her back against his side. She isn't shaking now, but she's ... vibrating. Ten years there, kissing bureaucratic ass? She's lucky she's here and not in prison. Indy'd always hated bureaucratic hypocrisy. Hated their Washington masters with a passion. But she was right. It was the only way to keep the SGC safe. It _was_ what he would have done. Just one more sacrifice. A long one. But there'd been supposed to be a payoff at the end. Because Carter made General, which meant _she_ could run the ant farm, Landry could go to Washington and take over Homeworld Security, and Indy and The Other Guy could ride off into the sunset.

Which hadn't happened, because the bastard died and left her. "You deserved to be happy," he says.

"When did any of us ever get what we deserved?" she answers bitterly. " _You_ didn't."

"No," he says. "I was supposed to die. Loki's failed experiment, remember? And I'm alive."

It's not the answer she expects, he can tell. She twists around in his arms to look at him, as if she'll find some explanation in his face. She's staring up at him, close enough to kiss. He's never kissed her. Not outside of a time-loop, something she doesn't remember. She has memories he doesn't, years of them. Memories of being Jack O'Neill's wife.

He shuts the thought away with ruthless practice.

"I suppose that's something," she says as if she doesn't quite believe it. She gets to her feet again, with determination this time. Re-wraps her robe and ties it firmly, standing with her back to him. Takes a few steps away. "You said... we had... to talk," she says haltingly.

As if they hadn't just been doing that. He sits forward, picks up his beer again. It's gone warm. Never mind. He needs something to focus on. "You. Me. Us. You going through the Gate," he says.

"Whether you're going to let me do it." She's back in the chair again.

"That's right," he says.

"Help me do it," she says.

"Why?"

"Nothing left for me here."

The truth -- _a_ truth -- at last. "Friends? Colleagues?" Bouncing her own words back at her.

"You don't make friends in Washington. Here? Dead, gone... Janet died a few months after you... left. I still miss her. There's Nyan. Good to see him again. Sammy. Weird to have her as the boss, though. Saw Teal'c at ...the funeral. Did you know he remarried? He's married to Ishta now. They're on Dakara, I think. Maybe Sammy will let me go for a visit soon. But ... not so much. Just about everyone I knew on the Teams is gone. In the Department? Colleagues. A lot of new faces. Amelia's leaving."

"And you're looking for ... what ... out there?"

She rubs a hand over her face, pushing her glasses up out of the way. "I have no idea. John." The name is an afterthought.

He thinks about what she's just said, and feels hard-won skills (part of a life he's set aside) come to life again. If he's supposed to convince the world he's _not_ Jack O'Neill, the two of them should stay far away from each other. Isn't that one of the things he came here tonight to tell her?

Knowing he wouldn't.

"If you go through the Gate, you'll be going with a Team. Are you going to be a liability? Are you going to get them killed?"

She hasn't thought about that, he can tell. Hasn't thought one step past making a Team. Would probably have this little talk with herself the moment her boots hit the ground the other side of the Gate on their first mission, and bad luck all around if the answers she came up with then were the wrong ones. He watches as she thinks about it now. Thinks hard, and honestly, because the SGC, the Teams, were important enough to spend a season in Hell for, and they're important enough for this. Thinks her way to the truth, even if discovering it means she has to give up the only thing she really wants. There's a long silence. Her eyes look inward. He waits.

"I won't. I'll give them my best. I'll bring them back."

It's the truth, but he wants more. Needs more. "Promise?" She's always kept her promises to him, or tried to. Torn between loyalties, just as he was. Love and honor and loyalty and duty, a better torture-chamber than anything the _Goa'uld_ ever devised.

"I promise." _I promise, Jack,_ he hears. He doesn't care who she's promising, so long as she keeps her word.

"Then I'll help you." She nods. He gets to his feet. "Time to go," he says. And past time. The music stopped a long time ago and the silence is way too loud. "Early day tomorrow. You need your beauty sleep."

She makes a face. "Oh, Johnny-me-lad, it's years too late for that."

#

After he leaves, she simply paces, too keyed-up either to sleep or to think. Just like in the very beginning, her mind focused on nothing, wearing a hole in the concrete between her cubbyhole office and the Coverstone Lab, walking for hours, hoping for inspiration to strike. It did, eventually. And her life began. And now she's here. Eventually she calms enough to settle on the couch. Finishes the beer he left. The symbolism of the act does not escape her.

She'd never thought about what his life must have been like. She should have. Considering the ramifications of the strange was her mandate. She should have thought it all through twelve years ago when they'd decided to papertrip him. But she'd been so glad to have Jack back. And he'd told her he and the SGC were taking care of things and it was all Top Secret; best that Baby Jack (they'd called him that) make a clean break with his old life. Best for _them_ , certainly. In one way, just as well for all parties concerned. The few hours she'd seen the two of them together had given her a taste of what it would have been like having Jack and a younger version of Jack in close proximity -- competing with each other the way Jack and his robot double had -- competing as if Nature would only allow one Jack O'Neill to a universe. Jack hadn't cared that his robot-self was -- inevitably -- physically superior. He'd attacked it as if under an irresistible compulsion. (So Sammy said. She hadn't been there to see.) She wonders sometimes what happened to their robot selves. Did Harlan repair them, make other copies? Somewhere beyond the Stargate is there yet another set of them as they were twenty years ago, roaming the Galaxy and getting into trouble? Has Robot Sammy come up with yet another upgrade in their powerpacks, allowing them even longer adventures? If there is, she hopes the SGC never finds out. She hopes that-Jack, that-Dani, are happy.

And what about _this_ Jack, _this_ Dani? (Not Jack. _John_. But Jack in every way that matters; it's easy to tell herself that when it's what she wants to believe. Tempting, fatal, doomed, stupid, disastrous on every level.) He was thirteen years older than she was when they met. Now she's seventeen years older than he is. And they aren't the same people in so many ways she'd really have to write yet another book to cover them all. Jack had always played the idiot Neanderthal in his SGC years, though he was far from stupid; played the clown. It was an act, planned out logically: he had two of the most brilliant women on Earth on his team, and his whole purpose as a commander had been, not to compete with them, but to lead them. To get the job done. To get them to think. To follow him in the field, and to trust him. He'd been trained to make that happen, and he had a whole toolbox of methods. And if getting them to trust him, to follow him, involved asking stupid questions, or obvious ones, or just making them laugh, that's what he'd do. That's what he did.

John's different. Not military, though the training's still there under the skin. But nobody's life rests on the decisions he makes, and hasn't for a long time. His interests, his focus, lie elsewhere. He's someone else. A could-have-been. But still -- in ways that matter to her -- a man she...

Loves? It's impossible. Unreasonable. Unfair. Does she mourn her husband or not? Is he alive or not? Should she shoot John to make sure? Then she could mourn _both_ of them. A bit unfair to John, though. The thought makes her giggle despondently, and she glances up at the mantle-clock perched on top of the bookshelf and sees it's long past midnight. Between jittering and introspection night's brief candles have almost burnt out. She's pulled her first all-nighter since her return and doesn't even have any work to show for it. Well, she'll survive one.

She gets up to make a pot of coffee. Scotch, beer, and what's going to be two pots of coffee before she hits her desk later this morning. A definite fall off the wagon of virtue. But just a small one. She'll climb back on. She'll qualify. She'll get a Team. And she'll keep them alive.

She's promised.

#

__

_**

V. Casablanca

**_

__

November. Mark and Angie and the kids fly East for Thanksgiving -- a gathering of the Clan Carter -- and of course Sammy invites Dani. Holidays are ritual occasions, their observance fossilized and unchanging over decades. This Thanksgiving marks how much her life has changed. Thanksgiving in Washington had been a horror; a social -- which meant a _political_ \-- occasion. She and Jack left town when they could manage it, but that wasn't often, only once or twice in ten years. This is her first Thanksgiving in the Springs since she left for Washington, and though it will be nothing like it was -- too many dead and gone -- it's still a bridge to those Novembers that hold some of her fondest memories. A few times they'd been offworld, or on standby. Usually Thanksgiving was held at General Hammond's house. One year... oh, god, Teal'c had been watching the Food Network again, and at his insistence they'd tried deep-frying a turkey in General Hammond's back yard. (It'd been freezing, and the ground was covered with early snow. She'd worn Jack's coat over her own while he'd sworn it was as balmy as a Minnesota spring.) They'd produced a twenty-foot high fireball and the neighbors called the Fire Department.

(She wonders what John's doing for Thanksgiving.)

She's not the only non-family guest, fortunately. One or two others of Sammy's choosing, all from the SGC, because who else do any of them see? Sammy didn't suggest inviting John; Dani's not sure whether it's to spare Sammy's feelings or hers. She's actually seeing more of John than she suspects Sammy knows. Oh, it's all aboveboard. But they work together. He spots for her when she lifts (hands all healed now) because the weight requirement's still giving her trouble and it's edging up on four months now, going to be five in December. She's in better physical shape than she's been in years; down to one cup of decent coffee in the morning and getting there just about killed her, but Erin's ecstatic. So... they work out together, too. Every night. She sees him in the Commissary. He sees her in her office. She sees him in his lab. They see each other in the Briefing Room. Not in the Infirmary yet, thank god. SG-35 has always come back through the Gate standing. So far.

He hasn't come to her place again. She's never been to his.

Meanwhile... Thanksgiving. And they all find things to talk about, which is a bit of a tap-dance when half of them can't talk about work, not really. Mark talks about his software company -- he retired from the San Diego PD a few years ago -- Angie talks about her real estate business, the kids are ... well, hardly kids any longer. Both in college now. The nuclear family. The road not taken.

Sammy never married. Hard to do, meeting and mating when your whole life's lived under a veil of secrecy. The only time she got close, the guy couldn't handle it. A Denver cop named Pete something; Mark hooked them up. Pete got tangled up in the middle of the whole Osiris mess. Even got to find out about the Stargate. Couldn't handle the fact The Job came first with Sammy. Just like her and Simon, a long time ago. Which is funny, in an unfunny way, because Simon became Osiris' host, and if Simon/Osiris hadn't come looking for her in some long complicated _Goa'uld_ -ish revenge plot, Sammy and Pete might actually be married today. A lot of people at the SGC have husbands, and wives, and perfectly normal lives.

Not SG-1. The first SG-1, anyway. The current team ... Dani runs over the roster in her mind. Thompson and Sands are both married with children. James (rumor has it) is a party animal. Mallory's engaged. Nothing but normal there.

She makes her excuses early. In defiance of half a century of social evolution, after the archaic meal has staggered to a close, the gathering splits on gender lines with surgical precision: the men to the living room and the football games, the women off to the kitchen to gossip, and she doesn't want to go into the questions of how she's coping with being only half of a couple now; if she's seeing anyone or planning to see someone. Because if she answered those questions honestly, the answers would be too surreal for words, and probably violate the National Security Act.

_Well, I'm keeping my options open. It's a tossup between my dead husband's clone or an interdimensional energy being who evolved from my quantum double. I'm having trouble making up my mind..._

When Dani gets ready to leave, Sammy loads her down with enough leftovers to feed a small African village for at least a month, including an entire pumpkin pie. Everybody brought food; Sammy doesn't have as much time to cook as she used to. At least she wasn't called back to the Mountain in the middle of the meal; that's a small blessing. It's so much food it takes all three of them -- her, Sammy, and Angie -- to get it out to the SUV.

"Honestly, Sammy, do you think I'm going to starve?"

"I think you still cook about as well as you used to."

"You got that right." They had a cook in Washington.

"Are you going to be okay?" Sammy asks. Twenty years of friendship; they know each other too well. Sammy has a pretty good idea of where Dani's thoughts have been all day. In that foreign country, the past.

" _Sammy!_ I'm going home to sleep it off. Tryptophan poisoning, you know. Very dangerous."

But she doesn't. The lights are on at John's place when she drives up. It's dusk. She knocks. After a moment he comes to the door. "I could leave," she says, when he opens it.

"It's a little too late for that," he says. "C'mon in."

"There's food in the car," she says. "That's why--" Just an excuse, really. He shrugs and comes out, leaving the door open. They manage to get it all inside in one trip.

"Carter figure you were incapable of feeding yourself?" he asks, setting the platters and containers on the counter. His kitchen's a mirror image of hers.

"Pretty much. And I figured--"

"M'm. Pie. Beer in the fridge. Game's on."

She gets a beer -- one won't hurt -- and settles on the couch while he lingers in the kitchen. He's got possibly the largest television she's ever seen. ("The Game" is indeed on, and she has absolutely no interest in sports, but she knows why she's here. Thanksgiving is about family.) John comes back from the kitchen, a beer in one hand and what looks like a quarter of the pie in the other. He sits down, sets the beer down, drapes an arm around her shoulders.

"Remember the time Teal'c wanted to deep-fry the turkey?" she says, when they cut to commercial.

"Oh yeah," he says. "Fire Department came. Hammond said the next bird he was gonna fry was mine. Couldn't keep a straight face, though." The arm around her shoulder tightens. "Glad you're here."

"So am I." God help her.

#

She's asleep on his shoulder, and without moving very much he snags the Colorado Avalanche blanket from the end of the couch and drapes it over her. Not exactly what he had in mind for the first time they slept together, but his former -- _very_ former -- military career taught him not to rush the target. He surfs around among the various games -- they'll go on for hours, and he's recording what he isn't watching, anyway -- catching highlights. (The Broncos go down early, but at least they made it to the Bowl.) He wonders if she thinks he's too young for her, although he isn't, except -- possibly -- on the outside. Or if this is too weird -- though where Indy's concerned, weirdness should be a plus factor. Or if it's too soon, though it's something over nine months now since she put her husband into the ground, and they all learned, back on SG-1 (though it was something he'd known already), that you just have to move on. Have to keep moving. But maybe it wasn't just Washington that was bad. Did the Other Guy manage to make her hate him -- at least enough that she doesn't want to try again with any version of him? Probably not. She wouldn't be here now if that were true. Might be a little skittish, though. Maybe that.

_But it's time to move on, now, sweetheart._

She asked him to wait for her, and he has. He didn't intend to wait for her -- at least, not that he'd ever admit. He'd never figured she'd be there for him, after all. She was with O'Neill. He'd taken as much comfort in that as he could. The idea of coming back to the SGC had actually been appealing almost as much from the standpoint of finding a dating pool of women with high security clearances -- where he wouldn't have to guard every single word -- as for the idea of getting to play with cool alien technology. Then he'd found out O'Neill was dead. And that Indy was coming back. And everything's gone sweetly downhill from there. There's no one else he wants. And -- he thinks -- she wants him, too.

He's not sure who he is in her mind -- but then, he's not really sure who he is in his own. The two of them can talk about a Thanksgiving Day fifteen years ago that she spent with Jack O'Neill -- but he's not the man she was married to for the last ten years.

_'Two roads diverged in a wood, and I...'_

He wonders just how different he and the Other Guy are. (Or were, at the end.) He's a civilian scientist with a matched set of doctorates. The Other Guy was a Pentagon General, the kind of guy he -- in his other life -- never had much use for. Dead weight. Paper-pusher. He wonders how much the Other Him liked his life, because actually, John has liked most of the things about his life -- since High School, anyway -- just fine. Which begs the question. Or does it? Indy knows who he is, she knows his history. It isn't like she's going to confuse him with the man she married and buried -- any more than he's confused himself. What he wonders, actually, is whether it's the ways he's the same that attract her, or the ways that he's different. No way to know.

She wakes up a couple of hours later. Yawns. Stretches. Realizes where she is. Rubs her face and discovers her glasses are missing. He hands them to her. "Game's still on," she says with a faint air of bafflement. (Apparently the Other Him never managed to get her to develop any interest in sports, as she _still_ can't tell one jersey from another.)

"New game. I owe Hicks twenty bucks now."

"Hah." She sits up, wraps herself more thoroughly in the blanket. He goes into the kitchen to fix himself a plate.

"Want anything?" he asks from the doorway.

"I'll come see."

She inspects every item on the counters before -- as he'd pretty much figured -- starting a pot of coffee instead. He puts the rejected items into the refrigerator. No sense in courting food poisoning.

"I shouldn't do this," she sighs, regarding the filling pot as if it contains some illicit designer drug.

"You think I've got Hunnicutt stashed in the closet?"

"Medical checkup in a week."

"I'll get Hicks to hack your file. The Doc will never know."

"Hicks?" Her tone is disbelieving.

"Yeah, the boy's a computer genius in his spare time, who knew? No good with alien computers, of course, but he can get into most of the databases in the SGC. 'Be prepared.' It's the Army motto."

"That's the Boy Scouts. The Army's is 'This We'll Defend.'"

"Army, Boy Scouts, what's the difference?"

She elbows him in the ribs -- gently -- and pours her coffee. They go back to the couch.

"Your turn to fall asleep," she says, when he sets his plate aside.

"I'm tough."

Silence for a while except for the television. She kicks off her shoes, tucks her feet up under her on the couch. Contemplates the blanket she's been sleeping under, looking as if it puzzles her, but whatever question it raises she decides not to ask. She sets her empty coffee cup on the floor.

"You're going to qualify, you know," he says.

"Haven't yet."

"Going to."

"And you know this how?" she asks.

"Because the Teams without A/T specialists are already fighting over you." It's true. 'Fighting' may be too strong a word. Jockeying for position, possibly. The final word will be up to Carter, of course.

"I haven't heard anything." She sounds miffed.

"We're very discreet."

"Not a word I'd use to describe the Loot-and-Shoot Teams." SG's 32 through 35.

"What makes you think it would be one of those?"

"Unless somebody's killed or invalided off, none of the other Teams needs an A/T specialist. And I've been telling Sammy for months the Loot-and-Shoot teams _do_."

"You could be wrong. It could be SG-1."

"Thompson's happy with Sands."

"Or--"

"Twenty-five Teams. You want to go through the whole list? And I don't really want to join a team that wants to axe its A/T specialist just to get ... me."

"Point," he agrees.

"'The famous Dr. Jackson'," she says, and there's just a little bitterness in her voice. About being a trophy. Or seen as one. Hard to avoid, though, after all she's been and done.

"Want to be loved for yourself alone, do you?" he asks. She makes a faint frustrated indignant noise. "I do," he says.

He reaches over and cups her jaw. She could pull away with the tiniest bit of movement. She doesn't. He leans forward. She opens her mouth into the kiss. This time, when he kisses her, they'll both remember it afterward.

#

He tastes of onion and sage; faintly, of beer. Of all the perverse forbidden kisses of her life, this may be the sweetest. Age, after all, lends you the perspective to properly understand and appreciate when you're doing something that's wrong, wrong, _wrong_... And right. And irresistible. And oh god she's never been able to settle for simple normal sex like normal people, _with_ normal people...

Spoiled for that a long time ago.

It's like kissing Jack and it isn't. Instinct tells her this _is_ Jack, but it's been years since Jack kissed her this way; as if everything were new. Because this is John, and John has never kissed her. Twelve years ago, Jack had never kissed her. She reaches up and puts her arms around his neck, drawing him closer. It's difficult to do. She's trembling so hard she feels boneless. His arms go around her in return and she can feel the press of his hands against her back as keenly as if she were naked.

"Dani, what do you want to do?"

She wants him to hold her, to kiss her, to keep on kissing her. But his face is pressed against the side of her neck, and apparently he wants to talk. Right now. She can feel his heart beating, hear the hitch in his breathing. "You have to tell me," she hears him say.

She doesn't want to talk. But it isn't fair if she doesn't. Explicit consent, asked and given. There can be no misunderstandings here.

"Take me into the bedroom, John. Take me to bed."

He said it was too late for her to leave when he answered the door. He was right.

#

She cries afterward. She didn't expect to. Uncertainty. Relief. Loss. She isn't sure what she's lost. And in the confusion between _John_ and _Jack_ her immediate assumption is that he'll be angry, and she doesn't know what to do or who to be, because the body in her arms is one she's never touched -- young and hard and unscarred -- and the caresses and the rhythms and the words he whispers to her in the dark are half-remembered, and all she's sure of is who he isn't, and knowing that feels like treason. He strokes her hair and holds her close, and holds her until she falls asleep.

In the middle of the night the phone rings, a far-too-familiar awakening. She hunts for it in the darkness automatically, still mostly asleep. The Pentagon must be calling. The Joint Chiefs. The President.

"Nielsen."

John's found it first. He sits up. There's a quick conversation in the darkness. He hangs up, and by the time he does she's more awake, though still not all the way there. Not the Pentagon. That's over. The Mountain. The SGC.

And she's in John's bed, not Jack's.

"They've got an instinct about these things," he says ruefully. "Where's your purse? I'll check your beeper."

"Door," she says. She rolls over, burying her face in the pillow. Most of the civilian staff has Friday off, barring emergency. Unless they're on a Gate Team, of course. And are called up in the middle of the night.

He comes back a few minutes later, leans over and kisses her shoulder. "It's just 35 being called in, but I've put your phone and beeper on the table here. I'll leave my spare keys by the coffeemaker. Go back to sleep."

She's asleep again before he's gone.

An unfamiliar slant of sunlight wakens her. She sits up, stares around the blurry unfamiliar bedroom. Pieces together the previous night. John Nielsen, and a far-from-conjugal bed. No matter what they have together -- what they know about each other elsewhere -- here they have no shared history. This is unique to them -- and, perversely, it makes her see _John_ where before she saw _Jack_ \-- the man he's become rather than the man he was -- and she's not sure what to think about that. She's actually glad he's not here. It makes for a much less awkward morning after when you wake up alone.

Happy Thanksgiving.

She dresses, finds his keys, locks up his unit, drives around to her own. No messages on her cellphone, or her home phone, or her email, so she showers and dresses -- it's noon by now -- and drives to the Mountain to find out just what the _hell_ was so urgent it dragged SG-35 (not the First Response Team; not one of the SAR teams) out in the middle of the night. The first place she goes is his lab. He's not there. Her next stop's her office. She can access most of the information on the Teams from there; being a Department Head grants certain privileges. She discovers SG-35 went through the Gate eight hours ago, returning to a planet they visited two weeks before, P3X-979 (from which they returned with a selection of entertaining yet baffling objects, gifts from equally entertaining yet baffling natives). They haven't come back yet. She goes down to Sammy's office.

#

"Sammy."

"Dani."

"SG-35."

"I'm not going to like this, am I?"

"P3X-979." Sammy regards her warily. The door to the office is closed. "Why were they called up and sent back there in the middle of the night?"

"I'm not even going to ask how you know that."

"Well, it's in the mission log, for one thing. Time of departure 0445. They're not back yet. They did 979 two weeks ago. No followup was planned."

"Dani--"

"Sammy, this is me. And a Gate Team's been out there for eight hours. Have they checked in?"

"Dani, do you think I don't know they've been out there for eight hours?" Sammy says tightly. "We haven't been able to raise them. After the first time we tried, the MALP was returned."

"And we haven't sent in SGs 3 and 5 why?"

"Because the Timareki are one of those advanced cultures I know I've mentioned to you, and the Pentagon doesn't want to jeopardize possible future relations. The Timareki are already saying we stole those items SG-35 came back with in the first place."

"What? But I thought Hamilton--"

"Hamilton said, McCluskey said, even Nielsen said -- everything was done by the numbers! They met with them, they talked to them, they explained everything, they were given the items, they came back. As per policy, they left a GDO with an IDC. At about 0300, we received a signal from the Timarek Council demanding SG-35 return with the stolen items. Immediately." Sammy has her game face on. She doesn't like this any more than Dani does. Dani remembers briefing the original mission -- she'd wished she could go -- they'd reminded her of the Tollen, a little bit, except they'd seemed eager to talk and trade. John hadn't talked much about them when he came back. He'd said they were boring. But two weeks ago she'd still been trying to avoid long involved conversations with John, and she hadn't sat in on the debrief...

"So you sent them back," she says.

"Yes."

 _And nobody's heard from them since. And the Timareki sent back the MALP._ "Okay, send me through."

"For God's sake, Dani--"

"Because we've obviously completely misunderstood whatever these people were saying to us in the first place. And we need to fix that and get SG-35 back."

"I'll send SG-9," Sammy says.

"No. Sammy, this isn't about diplomacy. I'm sure Major Hamilton's really diplomatic. This is about figuring out why the Timareki would give us things and then say we'd stolen them." Is it just a misunderstanding, or is there something else at work here? A trap? But why wait two weeks to demand SG-35's return? If it was a trap, they could simply have held the team hostage on the original mission--

"Dani." There's a note in Sammy's voice that stops her cold. "You weren't supposed to be here today. Four days off, remember? We talked about it? An actual vacation? How did you know SG-35 was called up in the middle of the night?"

"Sammy, I--" She doesn't need to either answer or try to come up with a suitable lie. The look on Sammy's face is enough. She knows how Dani knows, as surely as if Dani answered John Nielsen's phone early this morning. But Sammy doesn't say anything further. _Don't ask, don't tell._ (An outmoded military doctrine, but still -- always -- her life.) And besides, their problems are slightly larger at the moment than Dani's legendarily bizarre-and-bad taste in men.

"You haven't been certified for Offworld yet. I can't let you go running off half-cocked just because you've confused John Nielsen with Jack O'Neill." _Maybe yesterday. Not now._ Dani can hear the unspoken words.

"One, I know the difference," she says. "Two, I'll pass certification next month. Three, I have more first contact experience than anyone else in the SGC, _General_. I'm the best person to send." She hears the hardness in her voice and takes a deep breath, willing herself to be calm. She has to convince Sammy, not argue with her. "Sammy, I can do this. Please. Let me bring them -- _all_ \-- back." Everything she's said is true and they both know it. And the General has to put the mission before the people. Before friendships. Before anything else. Sammy can't keep her here -- safe -- if sending her to the Timareki will save SG-35. She watches, waits, hoping, as Sammy weighs all the factors and makes the call.

Sammy sighs. "Who would you want for backup?"

She thinks. Shakes her head. "If they're 'really advanced aliens', no amount of backup's going to help me, and you'd just be risking another team. I'll go alone. It might help prove to them we're negotiating in good faith, not trying to go in with a show of force of any kind." It's the right answer, but it takes her another fifteen minutes to convince Sammy. To convince _General Carter_ , because Sammy would never let an old friend walk into danger alone.

The General okays the mission.

She doesn't hurry. They're already dead, or they can hold on a little longer, and she doesn't dare go in unprepared. While Stores and Support is getting her gear together, she pulls up every single detail they have on the original P3X-979 mission, cursing softly because SG-35 _didn't_ have a cultural specialist with them. McCluskey's report covers where they went and what they did and who they saw, bang-bang-bang. Hamilton's covers the details of explaining to the Timareki who they were and what they wanted. John's and Hicks's describe the equipment they brought back and the other devices they saw. There's nothing much about the Timareki themselves, though there's a little film. John's report would probably be a lot more use to her, she thinks, if he weren't having to be ... John. Because if something there reminded him of something Jack had seen, he could mention it. John can't do that. But... did he write a draft version of his report?

It takes Sammy's personal okay to get John's login and passcode. But half an hour later, there they are, crouched over Dani's computer, logging in as JONIELSEN, and entering a string of numbers she types carefully from the scrap of paper Sammy holds out to her.

"What exactly are you looking for?" Sammy asks.

"Something he saw but couldn't report," she says absently, scrolling down through the list of files. "Because it's something Jack would have noticed, not John. I think he might have written it down anyway." She finds the subdirectory marked 'Mission Reports' and finds the cluster of files designated P3X-979. The SGC word-processing software's designed to save every single version of a file, creating a new copy each time the file's saved. It's a safety measure, to prevent accidental overwrites and deletions. Fortunately, the mainframe has a lot of storage space. She starts with the first one. It's only a few lines, headed 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation'. Slowly the files get longer; he's obviously constantly being interrupted. The style's nothing at all like the report he finally turned in; more like a cross between _Finnegan's Wake_ and a shopping list. Or a personal letter written to absent friends.

_\--and these Timberlakes who remind me way too much of the Aschen for anybody's peace of mind just go around smiling all the time and you'd really think Hamilton'd have a more suspicious nature by now makes Indiana look like a paranoid loner trying to convince them of OUR good intentions and I kind of think that should be the other way around people giving you things and not wanting anything for them you got to figure they're not really giving them to you--_

That's it. The Aschen. "Didn't John mention any of this in the debrief?" Dani asks.

"He said they seemed really eager to present SG-35 with samples of their technology. He told me later -- privately -- they seemed a little overeager to him. But he couldn't put his finger on just why. And the deal was done; they were back and we had no immediate plans to revisit 979. And -- Dani -- you know how ... General O'Neill ... always felt about advanced alien races. The Tollen. The Nox. The _Tok'ra_."

Dani sighs. The only advanced aliens Jack had ever gotten along with were the Asgard, but he'd loved the Asgard, and they'd adored him. One of Life's great mysteries. She checks the next few files, but John's already starting to clean up the report and put it into official language and format. She logs out of his account. "Okay, Sammy. I'm ready to go meet the advanced aliens who reminded John Nielsen of the Aschen."

And find out what's happened to SG-35.

#

She steps through the Gate into an environment familiar from the original MALP footage: a spacious -- aseptic -- white plaza with the Stargate in the middle. Retracing SG-35's original footsteps, she crosses the deserted plaza in search of the Timarek Council.

It takes her a week to free SG-35, and she's out of contact with the SGC for almost that entire period: no MALP to relay her signal, and the negotiations are delicate. The Timareki think it's rude to be interested in any place other than Timarek, so after her first request to report back to the SGC's turned down, she doesn't push it. She never gets to see SG-35. She only receives assurances they're still alive. She has to assume they are. Everyone's polite and smiling and cheerful _all the time_. No wonder the Timareki reminded John of the Aschen. There's that same sense things might tip over into planetary holocaust lurking just under the surface. She wonders if these people are related to the Aschen. There are a lot of the same cultural indicators here.

She learns a lot of things during her negotiations. The Timareki are really advanced sons of bitches. Their culture operates entirely on the basis of a planetary communism so perfect the whole idea of payment and barter are pretty much alien concepts to them. However, the concepts of theft, gift, and suitable recompense are still going strong. The Timarek economy's a closed system. They don't leave the planet or import things through the Stargate because they're completely satisfied with the pan-Timarek way of life. When SG-35 accepted the Timareki gifts and took them away through the Stargate, they were committing theft in the eyes of the Timarek Council. Yes, the objects were a gift: Hamilton understood them perfectly. But the Council hadn't expected him to take them offworld. Why, after all, would anyone ever want to leave Timarek? And if they did wish to leave Timarek, surely they wouldn't be so rude as to _remove items belonging to a closed economic ecology_. So when SG-35 left, the Timarek Council waited patiently for the items to be returned, and when they hadn't been, demanded their return along with the return of the thieves. And are now exacting suitable recompense for the theft. They won't tell her what it is. It takes her four days to get that far and learn that much. She's treated well, but she's expected to work in exchange for her room and board: suitable recompense. She spends half of each day in an orchard, picking fruit, the other half in negotiations with the Council.

(SG-35 was only here overnight. They'd eaten MREs and bivouacked in a local park. Standard field procedure, and probably at John's urging. The question of suitable recompense hadn't arisen.)

She grovels to the Council as she's never groveled before, to Tollen, _Tok'ra_ , or _Goa'uld_. It takes her another two days to talk them into accepting alternative recompense and to discover what they'll accept. When she finally phones home to tell the SGC it can have SG-35 back in exchange for 30 kilos of _naquaadah_ , Sammy nearly threatens to kill her out of sheer relief she's still alive. Right then, she's just as glad to be on Timarek, even though by now her back aches from all the hours of physical labor. (It's a strange dichotomy: surely a culture this advanced doesn't need to use such primitive farming methods?) And because it's her job, and because Sammy -- General Carter -- will expect it, she's also negotiated permission for a science team to return and study here. A cultural specialist will have to come with them, god knows, but as long as they don't try to take anything _away_ with them, they should be safe.

It takes another twelve hours for the SGC to collect the amount of _naquaadah_ that will free SG-35 and send it through the Gate. Finally the Timareki are ready to turn SG-35 over to her. The exchange takes place at the Stargate. The _naquaadah's_ just come through, and been approved as suitable alternative recompense by a Council representative. Dani looks across the square, and four figures, dressed in white (everybody wears white here; she feels horribly out of place in her green BDUs) are walking toward her, boxed in by six of the Timarek cultural regulators. She thinks they must practice some sort of Brave New World genetic manipulation here, because in every official capacity she's seen, form follows function, and most of the Timareki look enough alike to be cousins. The cultural regulation force is uniformly six foot two and beefy. (Hamilton's dark skin stands out shockingly, as does McCluskey's red hair.)

They reach the Stargate. They're barefoot, but they look healthy. (They're alive. She'll worry about 'well' later.) The men all have a week's growth of beard. She hasn't seen any bearded Timareki; perhaps they've engineered facial hair out of their genotype. Dani thanks Councilor Leel for her care, forbearance, and understanding, and says she looks forward to a long and happy relationship between their two peoples. (She hopes she never has to come here again.) She dials the Stargate and sends her code. It's so simple these days; all biometrics and the GDO's the size of her wristwatch; she couldn't give up her IDC if she wanted to. It's reassuring in a way, but she suspects there must be a way around this system just like with the old one.

The event horizon establishes. The five of them go through. Then they're standing on the Gate Room ramp looking down at an Armed Response Team. Sammy's there. She counts heads, tells the AR Team to stand down.

"All right, _what_ just happened?" John demands irritably, the moment the iris closes behind them.

" _This_ is what you get for going to the Emerald City without a cultural specialist, campers," Dani answers. For the first time since she walked through the Gate to Timarek, she doesn't have to guard every word, and the relief is intoxicating.

"Dr. Jackson, I take it we have you to thank for our ... extraction?" Colonel McCluskey asks.

"I just had to convince them you were sorry you'd stolen their toys, hadn't really meant to do it, pay your ransom, and here we are," she says.

" _Stolen_?" Major Hamilton says. "They _gave_ that equipment to us."

"Yeah," she says. "They just didn't mean for you to keep it. Which you would have known if--"

"Save it for the debriefing," Sammy says, meeting them as they make their way -- gingerly, on the part of SG-35, who are still barefoot -- the rest of the way down the ramp. "And welcome home. It's good to see you all back here and safe."

"It's good to be back, General," Colonel McCluskey says. "And if I never see another rice paddy, it will be too soon."

"It's interesting that their agriculture--" Dani begins.

" _'Interesting'_?" John says. "I was up to my ass in--"

"Hey! I was picking apples for the last week!" she snaps. And worrying -- about him, about them -- the whole time.

"Debriefing in one hour," Sammy says, shutting them all down. "Dani, over here." John grins at her as he follows the rest of SG-35 out.

"Good job," Sammy says, when Dani reaches her side.

"Thanks, General," she answers (they're in public, after all). "John's report gave me the first clue. Gifts, but not ones they meant SG-35 to keep."

Sammy sighs. She looks tired. The last week's been harder on her than it has on Dani. The not knowing. "Good catch. I'm glad to have you all back. Now come to my office."

Dani follows Sammy, puzzled. Is Sammy going to yell? She knows she was out of touch for a week, but she did her job in the only way she could. Sammy knows it goes that way sometimes. They go inside and Sammy closes the door, settling heavily into her chair. "Now get on that damned phone and call General Viorst and tell him you aren't dead. He's been wanting my head on a plate for the last four days."

 _Oh._ Maxfield Viorst is -- _was_ \-- one of Jack's Pentagon cronies. Poker buddy. Someone from her old life. "He knew I was gone?"

Sammy sighs. "I file reports, Dani. They read them. He wasn't all that happy."

Because Jack's 'little woman' jaunted off to the other side of the universe and got her ass in a sling, obviously. Viorst always was a troglodyte, but an important one: funding, connections... She sighs. Sits down. Picks up the phone. Dials the number from memory. A few secretaries and she's through to the Great Man himself. She keeps her eyes on Sammy's face as she speaks, knowing Sammy can guess the other side of the conversation from hers.

"Maxie? Hi, it's Dani. --Yes, I just got back. --Oh, you know how it is, phone service's lousy in those third-world countries. --No, no problems. Just took forever. --Oh, I don't think so, I'm pretty settled here. --Yeah, having a great time. --Yeah, she's great too. --Oh, I certainly will. --Definitely. --You do that. --All right then. Love to Ellen and Babe. Bye." She hangs up and takes a deep breath. "I hate that son of a bitch," she says quietly. Sammy gets up and walks around the desk and puts an arm around her shoulders. Dani turns her face into Sammy's stomach and Sammy just holds her for a moment. The General's probably not supposed to cuddle her civilian consultants, but Sammy's her friend, too. After a moment Dani eases away and stands.

"Thanks," Sammy says.

"What are friends for?" Dani hesitates for a moment. "Oh, Sammy, how did we all ever end up like this?"

Sammy grins at her, tired but game. "We didn't die. Now get to Medical. You don't want to be late for the debriefing."

#

Up to the Infirmary for the post-mission check-out. The routine's still familiar even after a lapse of years. Needles in -- vitamins and a broad-spectrum antibiotic. Needles out -- blood samples. Urine sample. Blood pressure. Epithelial swab. Erin stares into her eye with a penlight as if she can see the mysteries of the universe there, and Dani remembers Janet, remembers Sally, remembers dead and absent friends. "Well, you seem to be in surprisingly good shape, Dani."

"Lots of healthy outdoor exercise," she answers dryly.

"Run into anything strange?"

"Other than the whole culture? I don't think so. I was eating the native food for a week, though."

"H'm." Erin regards her critically. "Feel okay?"

"Fine. I stuck with simple things." She could have had anything she was willing -- or able -- to pay for. She'd lived on bread, fruit, and water in order to have the most possible negotiating time. She'd had a couple of Power Bars with her.

"Well, all right. But if you start to experience any peculiar symptoms..."

"Right back here. I know the drill."

Erin pats her on the shoulder. "I know you do. Okay. You can dress and shower."

#

"Have you thought about your Team assignment?"

She and Colonel McCluskey are in the Women's Showers. The Colonel seems determined to use up every drop of hot water the Base has.

"Constantly," Dani answers. It's a good thing she's been working out on Base, because otherwise she wouldn't be keeping a toiletry kit here. And she can't use the soap and shampoo the Base stocks. Her allergies won't permit it.

"You were right. SG-35 _does_ need a cultural specialist. Even if we're dealing with advanced races."

"Going to shoot Hamilton?" She steps out of the shower and dries herself quickly. Wraps up in the familiar blue robe.

"I have no intention of getting rid of Hamilton." McCluskey follows her out. "Not every team's a four-man team."

It's true. Only about two-thirds of them. There's no hard-and-fast rule. When Jack stepped up to General, SG-1 was a threesome until it was decommissioned. "So you want to add someone from A/T to 35?" she says. She opens her locker. There's no clean uniform, of course. She starts to dress in her civilian clothes again.

"Don't play coy, Doctor. You've dealt with the Asgard, the Nox, the Tollen, the _Tok'ra_. All advanced races. You just saved our assets back on 979. You're coming up for assignment. It's the General's decision, but she'll want to keep you happy; you're old friends. You and Nielsen seem to get along. I think you'd like us. And I'm going to be requesting a cultural specialist be attached to SG-35. After 979, I think the request will carry some weight."

At the mention of John's name, Dani looks up. The Colonel's watching her expressionlessly. _Does she know who he is? Who he ... was?_ If she joined 35, she could go through the Gate with John. Again. For a moment Time collapses and Now is Then again. But this time -- _this time_ \-- the future won't take her to the same place. She won't let it.

 _'Are you going to be a liability? Are you going to get them killed?'_ No. She's proven that. And together she and John can beat any odds. They always had. And she finds she likes McCluskey, even though she doesn't know her very well yet. Marine? Not all that typical of the Marines Dani knew once upon a time.

"Come out to dinner with us tonight. We're celebrating. They were feeding us on bread and a kind of rice gruel for the last week -- apparently it was healthy enough, but you miss steak," McCluskey says.

"Thanks, Colonel," she says. "I'd love to." She's missed more than steak.

The debriefing's a long one, but the real details will still be in the as-yet-unwritten reports. In theory, SG-35 would have been let to go eventually, once they'd worked off the 'suitable recompense' assessed for their theft. But since their shelter and rations and clothing were also being assessed against the amount they had to work off -- Dani guesses this from her own experience, and Hamilton has a good memory, and is able to report the conversations his Timareki guards had with him fairly accurately -- in practice, their term of imprisonment and forced labor would have lasted the rest of their lives.

All over a misreading of culture.

"Gee whiz, I guess sometimes ethics and good intentions just don't cut it," John says, grimacing. He isn't happy about the Timarek mission disaster, but his reactions confuse Dani. In the old days (when he was Jack; when they were SG-1) he would have been taking the blame for what happened, taking responsibility, accusing the Timarek of all sorts of implausible crimes. In the debriefing he's been fairly quiet; only Hicks has had less to say.

"Dr. Nielsen is, unfortunately, right. No disrespect to Major Hamilton. He did a fine job negotiating with the Timareki, and it was my call to bring the samples back at the close of the initial mission," Colonel McCluskey says. "I take full responsibility, General."

"Nobody's blaming anybody here, Colonel." Sammy says. "I know you -- all of you -- did your best. I'm just glad to have you all back." General Hammond said that so many times.

"We've been lucky so far," McCluskey adds. "I'd rather not count on that luck to hold. The next time, we might not get just an agricultural vacation."

Dani was picking apples; it was fairly light work. SG-35 spent the same seven days planting rice -- or a close analogue -- somewhere hot; brutal, back-breaking, labor-intensive work. They were separated, without their equipment, with no idea of where the Stargate was in relation to where they were. (She hears John mutter something under his breath about 'Southeast Asian War Games.' That sounds a little more like Jack.) It's actually possible SG-35 would have escaped and made it home -- at least to a neutral world, one without an iris over its Stargate -- on their own. Eventually. Dani really hates to think about the 'suitable recompense' the Timareki would have tried to exact for that.

"So I'd like to tender a formal request, General, to add another specialist to SG-35. Someone with experience in evaluating the social aspects of alien cultures," McCluskey finishes.

"Thank you, Colonel. I'll take your request under advisement," Sammy says.

#

O'Malley's is still there, and the steaks are as good as they ever were. Dani likes the way SG-35 is together. Hicks is the quiet one. Lowest ranking; only a technical sergeant, but brilliant with his hands, and a Combat Sniper's badge in addition to his many other skills. But not shy of his officers, and capable of getting off a zinger when the mood strikes him. A southern accent -- Tennessee hills -- you can cut with a knife.

Hamilton's from Boston; he's about McCluskey's age. Major Pierce Butler Hamilton III, PhD. His family's been there since the Revolutionary War. Harvard. Air Force Academy. Ethics is his field. Doing the right thing at all times. Brilliant, thoughtful, still obsessing over the fact 979 went toes-up, even though it wasn't his fault. Sometimes you just have to let the bad ones go. Jack chivvied her into that more times than she can remember now.

McCluskey. Colonel Mary Margaret Perline McCluskey (it comes out after the first couple of rounds). Catholic (lapsed), and known for being able to recite the fastest 'Hail Mary' under fire of any Marine who wasn't supposed to be under fire in the first place. Has been here and there, done this and that.

"Oh," Dani says innocently, eyes wide. "Black Ops." McCluskey inhales a sip of bourbon and chokes. John kicks Dani's ankle under the table.

"That's right," McCluskey says, in the tones of someone who's just remembered something. "You were in the field with General O'Neill, weren't you?"

"Don't be coy, Colonel," Dani says lightly.

After dinner, John follows her home -- in the sense of driving right behind her. She's been careful -- only one beer at the start of the meal -- but the body's less ... forgiving ... in middle age (and oh yes, that's where she is now) than in the rowdy years of immortal youth and she has no intention of climbing behind the wheel of her monster ride unexpectedly drunk and piling it into something. Her virtuous lifestyle hasn't allowed her to build up anything like a tolerance lately; long gone are the days she could sink three or four beers and still be able or willing to drive a couple of hours later. But all this sobriety means her mind's clear. Has been clear all night. And so she's gotten a chance to watch something that, in fact, she's spent the last three months carefully avoiding: she's seen John out in public among his new peers, being treated as if he's who he seems to be. It's different at the briefings. Those are ... brief. And she's usually speaking to Hamilton or McCluskey, anyway. John doesn't have a lot of questions for her because in almost every case she doesn't have any answers for him. She doesn't know whether or not she likes the idea that Jack could change so much in twelve years. She knows he could: wasn't that the problem? Is it the idea he could change in a completely different direction, and that she isn't sure whether the John Nielsen she saw tonight is real or an act, a lie he's forced to live and will be forced to live for the rest of his life? And even more disturbing than the question of who John Nielsen really is -- the age-old question of Nature over Nurture -- is the question of who she wants him to be. Does she want him to be Jack O'Neill risen from the grave? Or is she praying that he isn't?

She reaches home. Parks. John pulls up beside her, and gets out when she does. "Nightcap?" she suggests. She knows, after Timarek, after her welcome home, that she feels an urgent desire to be less-than-sober, and John was being nearly as cautious as she was tonight.

"Oh yeah," he says. "I haven't gotten my chance to yell at you yet, and I know for damned sure Carter didn't."

That sounds more like the man she knows. Or knew. "Oh, god," she sighs, opening her door, "be kind. I had to placate General Viorst today." He looks at her quizzically, eyebrows raised. He doesn't know who General Viorst is. Part of the life she shared with Jack, not John. They're so much alike. The same man. But ... different. The question (the one she has to ask herself, for honesty's sake, and keep asking until she gets an answer), is where does the attraction lie? In the sameness? Or the difference? "Maxfield Viorst," she says, as he follows her in. "He's in Homeworld. Found out I'd gone through the Gate, and... Well... You see..." she waves her hands.

"He knew you in Washington. And he didn't know you at all," John says.

She sighs. That's it in a nutshell. "So all week, while I was on 979, he was camped out on Sammy's phone. And the first thing I had to do when I got back -- the _first_ thing, John, for crying out loud -- was call him up and reassure him that I was fine, fine, _fine!_ " She spins around, an antic dance of sheer irritation. She thought she'd left Washington behind, but it's followed her here, and the pain -- the _unfairness_ \-- of that is simply too much to bear.

He takes her by the shoulders. Turns her to face him. Kisses her on the forehead to settle her. Something Jack couldn't do when there was the most need for it, but did do later, just as John's doing it now. Nature and nurture, and she wonders how much of behavior is genetic, only this wouldn't be a case of genetic programming, this would just be a case of the same man with the same history behaving in the same way once he was permitted to by circumstance. With the same woman.

"Still not letting you off the hook, Indy. What the hell made you think you could just go charging through the Gate like John Wayne? And ... by yourself? That's--"

"My job," she says flatly. Her job, her _self_ , this is who she wants to be, not the woman who can prattle away on a telephone to soothe Washington kingmakers.

"Because the Harvard boy screwed up?" John asks. He sounds like Jack now, not John; she thinks it may actually be possible to chart the shift in assumed identity by the shift of the vowel-sounds. She thinks about the sense at the same time as she analyzes the sound; doing both at once is habit by now; she's thought of language this way since she was in her teens. _'The Harvard boy.'_ Pierce is a year or two younger than she is. Fifteen years older than John Nielsen. She steps away from him and walks into the kitchen. Gets out the Scotch and the glasses. Pours them both a drink. He's followed her in. She hands him a glass.

"Nobody screwed up, Johnny. Pierce wasn't trained to spot the warning flags. I don't know if _I_ would have seen them if I'd been on the initial mission. You didn't."

"I knew I didn't like those guys," he says stubbornly. Unwilling to admit Timarek was nobody's fault. He wants it to be his -- she knows him well enough for that -- but he wasn't leading the mission. McCluskey's taken the blame and Sammy's absolved her. Pierce is still re-fighting the battle, Hicks is staying out of the whole thing, and Dani wasn't there. But the truth is what she's just told him: it was nobody's fault. Sometimes aliens are just alien.

"For what it's worth, I don't think they're actually human," she answers. "I think they've been doing a lot of genetic engineering on themselves for a really long time. It would explain a lot of things about their society. Humans don't act that way. And if you hadn't written all that stuff about the Aschen in your draft report, I'd probably still be there banging my head against the wall." Things only Jack would have written, though John was the one who went on the mission. She rubs her eyes wearily, pushing her glasses up. Sometimes her life's too weird to parse.

"I... wait. You read my files?" At least he's distracted now.

"Just the drafts of the report on 979. Hey, not like I had time to go snooping through all your personal stuff." Interesting though it would have been, she would never have done it.

"Just as well," he mutters.

"'Makes Indiana look like a paranoid loner?'" she quotes, matching his tone with mock indignation of her own. It's all for show. So many of their arguments were, back in the day.

"Nobody sees that stuff. And I'm changing my passcode," he announces.

They go out to the living room, carrying their drinks. She sits down, but he doesn't join her. He's still not finished. The sparring's over; he's serious now. "It was too big a risk sending you. Carter should just have written us off."

"You wouldn't," she points out, sipping her Scotch. Jack when he was General, she means, but they both let it go. "General Hammond wouldn't. They'd already tossed our MALP back at us. We couldn't go in hot. Lose a whole SG Team because of a misunderstanding?" she shakes her head. "I could fix it. I put a mission proposal to Sammy. She authorized it."

"You twisted her arm," John accuses.

"You bet I did," she agrees. "And how many times did SG-1 twist General Hammond's arm? We did everything but blackmail the poor man. And go through the Gate without permission how many times? Two? Three?"

"Four, I think. Wasn't keeping count." He isn't pacing -- Jack never did -- but he's standing over her, looming. Not angry, but not willing to let this go, not yet. She wonders if it's her motives he isn't quite satisfied with, or the fact he wasn't in charge. He's been comfortable so far as McCluskey's civilian, but it hasn't been a very long shakedown cruise and this is the first time things have gone bad.

"And it always came out right. And so did this," she says, reminding him. She realizes this was what she'd been expecting to hear from him at the debrief; the same complaints he'd always had of her recklessness, the insistence she _be more careful_. They hadn't come then, because they weren't things John Nielsen could say to Dani Jackson. He's saying them now.

"McCluskey said it. We can't run on our luck forever," he says stubbornly. (Oh, god, Jack was always a stubborn pain in the ass. Well, she was too. Two of a kind.)

"So we die. Oh, trust me, John, it's better to die in harness." She sips her Scotch, looking up at him.

"That what you want?" he asks, looking down at her. His expression is unreadable.

 _'It's not really death..._ ' "Not today and not tomorrow. McCluskey wants an A/T specialist; you heard her. If she gets one, no more problems."

"She wants you." He sits down beside her at last. "What do _you_ want?"

To go running headlong into disaster and certain death with people she trusts. "Sammy knows." New subject. He doesn't need her to spell it out.

"You tell her?"

She shakes her head fractionally. "She guessed. I went charging up to the Mountain on Friday to find out what yanked 35 up there in the middle of the night. I wasn't supposed to be back until Monday. She didn't buy my story I'd just checked the mission log."

He puts a hand on her knee. "World's worst liar."

"I _did_ check the mission log," she protests. "That's how I knew you hadn't come back. Eight hours and no check in."

He sighs. "By then I think we'd already been shanghaied. I don't know. I was sort of ... asleep ... at the time."

From the debrief, she knows he'd tried to get the others to make a break for the Stargate when things started to go sour, but Pierce had still been trying to negotiate their way out of the charge of theft. The Timareki used some sort of energy device on John, rendering him unconscious. Then -- according to McCluskey -- they'd all been disarmed and imprisoned.

"Might make things awkward," he says, back on the subject of what Sammy knows.

"My business, I guess," she says. She's a little irritated. Isn't her personal life her own affair? Only it never was, back in her SG-1 days. She hadn't had a personal life that didn't include Sammy, Jack, and Teal'c; no relationships not tangled up in theirs, on or offworld, and the central one, the one that held them all together, had been the one she couldn't claim. "Being on the same Gate Team?" she says, jumping conversational tracks once more. "Wouldn't that be _déjà vu_ all over again?" She realizes there's an unexamined assumption here having nothing to do with Gate Teams, the SGC, or the future of the Galaxy, but with the fact that what they did Thanksgiving night wasn't just a one-night-stand; the satisfaction of her curiosity, or his, but instead the start of something neither of them has any intention of ending. And that she can't -- or won't -- let go of.

"Mmm... not really," he says, smiling faintly. "Two civilian consultants. Both outside the military chain of command. If McCluskey doesn't care, the Air Force shouldn't care." He sounds slightly distracted, but as if he's finally letting go of all the post-mission baggage. So much of it had to do with her -- and with who they were and still are to each other -- that working through it could really only be done in private. Just the two of them. "Three days off," he says. Another new subject. "Seventy-two hours." They've all got that, after P3X-979.

"I really need to see what AA&T's up to," she says, sighing. "It's been a week."

And she has thirty-five teams to prep and brief these days, not to mention running their completed mission reports through her department on the eternal _Goa'uld_ -hunt. She knows the _Goa'uld_ are still out there, even if there are times she starts to feel as if she's the only one who still believes it. The Crackpot Dr. Jackson: not a new look on her at all. At least it isn't as if she has to do all the work in AA &T herself these days -- not like back in the old days, when the Program was just starting and they had half-a-dozen Gate Teams that'd hit the ground running and if anybody was going to get anything approaching a cultural briefing in the first year, she was the one who had to give it. She was scrambling to find and hire specialists in everything from Ancient Egyptian to medieval archery, and trying to convince General Hammond they needed to do more than use the Stargate to loot alien worlds of alien weapons. Skaara was alive then, and she was looking for him.

Almost 20 years ago.

"Oh, no," John says, squeezing her knee. "Rest. Relaxation. Post-mission concubinage."

" _Concubinage_?" she demands, when the word sinks in.

"I've got a doctorate, you know. Two, actually. That gives me a license to use big words on occasion. Or, you know, if you just want to talk, we could talk about my work, Dr. Jackson. You know... bearing stress... clamping force... the coefficient of friction..."

The hand on her knee slides up a few inches. He leans over and kisses the side of her neck. She sets her empty glass down on the end table abruptly, light-headed with something inadequately-defined as passion at being ... courted ... so unequivocally. She thinks of the past seven days, and the anxiety she'd had to pretend not to feel. Of losing Jack twice. Of losing John.

"And then there're direct tension indicators. Very important. And I haven't even gotten to environmentally-assisted cracking..."

She turns toward him. Pulls his head up until their lips are just touching. "Shut up, damn you! I thought you were dead."

Bearing stress.

The coefficient of friction.

#


End file.
